


Shadow State

by intrepid_ly



Series: Shadow State [1]
Category: Political RPF - US 21st c.
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, El Camino del Diablo, Engineering, Gen, Multi, Near Future, Political Alliances, Political Campaigns, republicans vs democrats vs reality, the devil's highway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-30
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-08-18 16:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 24,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8169167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intrepid_ly/pseuds/intrepid_ly
Summary: It's the near future, and we have a new government--a government guided by fear and the cult of personality. We're building a wall, we're renegotiating trade deals, and we're defunding supposedly "unnecessary" institutions. The catastrophic effects of climate change are upon us. We're at war and not just with ourselves. This is a future in flux.Enter Benno Jackson, Neech, Argo, and their fellow proletarians. These are the people on the front lines, but some of them might surprise you. Some of them might surprise everyone. For in a world of money and fame, they're not entirely without power.





	1. Benno // Tinajas Altas

 

 

   

### Tinajas Altas // Barry Goldwater Air Force Range (BMGR)

 

The Sonoran Desert had already claimed many lives when it began to devour the futures of America’s finest engineers. Benno Jackson took a bite out of his deli sandwich and stared down the shattered slope at the construction crew roving among the rocks, heads down and glittering under bright white hard hats. It was high noon and hotter than the inside of a cougar’s mouth.

The imagery couldn’t have been more brutal in its physical manifestation. The initial survey team for this godhaunted scrap of border country had lost six members over its four-month evaluation. Five were taken to the town of Fortuna Foothills and then transferred to Tucson for treatment of dehydration and sunstroke. One died before he left the mountains. Seizure. He’d dropped without a sound, limbs locked, and by the time he was found and his boss figured out they’d left the insulin in Tucson the man was deep in a diabetic coma. The team’s only enrolled tribal member, his death gathered significance in the way of quiet toasts and sidelong glances.

The team leader was suspended pending investigation, but it never occurred to the higher-ups that a substitute ought to be sent in order to finish his task before summer. After six rudderless weeks, the rest of the survey team simply quit, the project itself left in limbo for months. Finally, almost a year behind schedule, the first construction crews were sent in to begin the actual work.

And theirs wasn’t even the most impressive delay. Everyone from the architects who designed the Wall — officially called the Troia but commonly designated the Wall of Shame in many Old Washington circles and Fort Shit by the crews actually tasked with building it — to the demolition experts sent in to disassemble the security fence to the musclebound laborers who followed them with concrete and rebar to the quarry foremen and the men iin fine suits in back rooms at fine hotels were behind schedule.

Any project that had bumped around in limbo as long as the Wall had was bound to pick up a few names, and Benno had been attached to it long enough to remember when it was called the Palisade, back when Democrats were only _ideologically_ devastated by its construction and jokingly called it Hadrian’s Folly. But Troia had stuck, courtesy of a disillusioned pundit who’d drawn comparisons between the Wall and Homer’s city of Troy. “Not for love of a woman, but for love of one’s own body and image,” he’d written. “This is a monument to human ego.”

And the President, thin-skinned but equally sensitive to opportunity, re-dubbed the Wall. His lawyers didn’t like it, but they’d learned the logistics of sudden change by rote repetition.

The Tinajas Altas weren’t the worst place on earth, but they were a long way from comfortable. The temperatures routinely topped one hundred and fifteen degrees in summer and, while not exactly towering in altitude, were roughly as approachable as a porcupine doused in gasoline and set alight. Even the untouched hillsides had the appearance of a demolition zone to Benno’s untutored eye, broken rock as sharp-edged and shifting loosely underfoot. Great slabs of it tilted skyward on all sides, bathed in dust raised by the faintest breeze. His crew had tucked themselves away in every tiny sliver of shadow cast. Only the site manager under his pop-up canopy found any relief, and he was two days fresh out of Dallas and tranquil with exhaustion. Benno hadn’t managed to keep a manager for more than two weeks the entire time he’d been assigned the BMGR section. As defacto supervisor by pure cussedness and longevity, he kept a file of names on rotation.

Cipriano Pass lay to the north, all three passes bearing that name, actually. The original pass was an historic migration route, but the Border Patrol had given its name to several of its more southerly cousins, including the one they’d used to maintain and patrol the security fence. The Tinajas Altas, an arm of the Gila Range, ran roughly north-south according to the compass, dividing two of the Sonoran Desert’s many sub-deserts, the Lechuguilla to the East and the Davis Plain and Yuma to the West. Acre upon acre of land no white easterner could fail to find forbidding. A string of natural springs arced west and north from the border — Aguajita, Quitobaquito, Williams, and Burro — and it was these oases as well as the natural rain-fed “high tanks” after which the Tinajas Altas were so literally named that had made this a kind of desert thoroughfare over the centuries. They called it the Devil’s Highway, and it was the reason Benno Jackson had been eating the same deli sandwich every day for nine months in this far scrap of country. It was the reason they were building a Wall.

One of the reasons, anyway.

Benno flicked a glance over at the equipment. There were two protesters down there, eyes hazy with heat and skin cooked pink. They’d chained themselves to a backhoe and a forklift, wearing body paint and those water bottles you can drink from through a straw. These two were white as all get-out, but sometimes Benno would reach the site of a morning to find a lone man or woman with the stare of a true desert-born. Those protesters came without all the fancy gear, but they lasted a lot longer than these two ever would. Protesting their rights as a sovereign nation without receiving a lot of attention from the world outside, Benno suspected, was something America’s indigenous peoples been doing for far too many years to count.

Benno liked the protesters, even if they paralyzed an already slow process. Theo and Rayna, the current two, had driven over from San Diego in a beat-up Volvo that now sat parked along the Border Patrol’s dirt road. He was a corporate tax specialist and she taught design at the Art Institute. They were well-educated and polite, grateful whenever someone stopped in to check on how they were doing. Like a lot of others they’d expected to be arrested either en route or on site, but the Border Patrol had given up trying to sort out contractors from protesters and the BMGR’s beefed-up private security force was done being sued; it refused to touch anything related to the Wall. As long as the protesters were happy chaining themselves in one spot, they weren’t likely to run afoul of unexploded ordinance.

Besides, there were a _lot_ of protesters and not all of them could be an official problem. Not unless one of them died, and Benno wasn’t the survey leader. His crew were going to finish what they started, by all that was both holy and foul, and leaving no one in hospital or the morgue. He crumpled the soggy paper sandwich wrapper in one hand and leaned over to spit in the dirt. The cuffs of his jeans were feathered with the tiny detachable spines of the prickly pear cactus. He didn’t dare brush them off; the little glochids had a nasty habit of biting into bare skin and staying there for days. Damn bloody nightmare.

He pulled himself to his feet with a grunt and checked the time. He’d give Theo and Rayna a couple more hours before offering them a fresh round of sunblock and a free ride back to Fortuna that evening. Nine times out of ten, protesters broke down after only a day or two. Like everyone else in the state of Arizona, they were ready to go home.

 

* * *

 

Evening in Fortuna and the air tasted like motor oil and wet pavement. Someone’s sprinklers were on and the gutter crackled with a thin trickle of water.

“Himk ‘ehi:kï!” a woman yelled again and again in the street outside a Fortuna bar, her jeans ripped and bare knees blistering. She was carrying a plastic grocery bag with something in it and limping barefoot over the cracked asphalt. He turned to one of the engineers, a local, and the man had just shrugged. “Sounds tribal,” he said when pressed.

Benno asked Neech to pass the phone to Argo later that evening, when he’d had a moment to polish off his beer and recharge his cell. “Can you look it up?” he asked her, knowing himself to be unreasonable. Argo had started dating his college roommate — the entirely forgettable Isaac — when they were all sophomores, but after an obscene and yet entirely predictable bout of political activism she’d left for an internship in North Dakota and disappeared for a few years. In a move that surprised everyone, however, she’d crashed Benno’s grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. She’d picked Benno’s cousin Neech out of the crowd, nailed her in the tool shed, and been back in time to snatch some dessert. Benno only felt slightly cheated when it turned out that Argo and Neech actually liked each other, but he wasn’t above taking advantage.

Argo had the kind of connections that made social networking look like amateur play, and she was the sort of person who could make things happen without seeming to care one way or the other. When a nearby museum for African American history had been defunded, a crowd of volunteers manifested out of the ether to keep the doors open. Without making a big fuss about it, Argo had installed herself as keeper of the museum library and installed a mattress, coffee pot, and secure internet access. They’d been kicked out several times for squatting, but after the third time the community threatened a protest and, fearing yet another incident, local law enforcement began turning a blind eye. After all, good free public wi-fi was getting hard to find, even for them.

Benno felt the blistering touch of Argo’s glance, two and a half thousand miles distant, as she processed his question. She texted him back at three in the morning.

 

> _ARGO: Go and get a haircut!_

> _BENNO: What?_

> _ARGO: It’s Tohono O’odham, jackass._

> _ARGO: And given whose Wall you’re building, that sounds about right._

> _BENNO: How are things with Neech?_

> _ARGO: Fuck you._

Benno smiled up into the pale light cast by his phone. Stretched across the back seat of one of the crew’s ATVs with a full pack of matches balanced on his knee, he felt the first breath of deep evening air rise from the arid soil. Tomorrow the work would begin again, the churn of dug soil and the stink of fresh concrete and the monument rising in the desert, slab by slab. This was the hour of memory, when the desert stillness cracked open and all the wild things passed unseen through cities of hungry dreams.

 

  


 


	2. Argo // Alexandria Black History Museum

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meet Argo and Neech, Benno's contacts close to the heart of the shit storm that is Washington, DC.

**Alexandria Black History Museum // Parker-Gray Historic District, City of Alexandria (VA)**

* * *

 

 

Argo hadn’t ventured out into direct sunlight for three days. The Watson Reading Room, lit only by a single floor lamp to save on electricity, was gathering the advancing evening into its far corners. The darkness took on substance here, in this building.

It wasn’t that it was particularly _old._ The Reading Room had only been opened in ’95 and the museum proper had served as the segregated black library for Alexandria after its construction in 1940. It had weathered its fair share of history, transitioning from library to civic center after desegregation in the ’60s and finally reframing itself as a research center and museum in ’83. No, the Reading Room didn’t have the character and romance of an old building. But it had personality. A grim one, these day. Or perhaps simply dim, and blinded. Like a woman in a dark room, groping.

Like Argo, in other words.

She reached upward from her position at the table, stretching limbs long frozen in place from an afternoon staged in exile from the ordinary universe. The others had been here before, were long gone, slipping out blinking into the afternoon sun after a marathon four-day hack. She’d stayed behind, as she always did, to obsess over the wrap-up. Her friends rarely made mistakes — or she wouldn’t have called them friends at all — but they couldn’t afford even one slip. The eyes watching them were only blind so long as there was nothing left to see, she knew, and all it would take to break open this room with all of its dark corners was a careless line of code. A word.

But even she was done, now. Her refuge was safe for the moment, secure against the footfalls of heavier souls. So she cracked her back, shook loose her wrists and opened her shoulders to the first deep breath of the day. She could — would — return to the land of ordinary sighs, of walking the quiet streets like every other woman.

A clap and the last lamp flicked off. Argo slipped her gear into a backpack, shuffled an armload of wrappers and crumpled napkins off of the table and into the trash. Left the Reading Room in darkness, locking up with a turn of a key and a command from her phone. The air outside tasted heavy, like rain might lurk just over the horizon. She turned off the phone and swapped it out for the one in her jacket pocket, which she left turned off for the moment, savoring the silence as she crossed the narrow path separating Reading Room from Museum. The simplicity of unplugging, the wrath of it. She let the air do the talking, tuning in to the messages of dusk as the city rose up around her. It was a familiar process, now, this little ritual of hers.

They made an effort to keep a volunteer on site at all times, to keep the steady encroachment of theft at bay. They’d already lost so much. It wasn’t always possible to keep the desperate from moving in, and in fact they didn’t really want to turn them away, but they had come so far and given so much to see the old library through to the present that they felt some of its original purpose deserved protection. Any other underfunded and unprotected building could serve as a squatter’s paradise, but they’d be damned it they let that happen here.

Tonight’s volunteer was Ada Revere, a scrappy lady in her sixties with an affinity for the long night hours. She used the free wifi to stream jacked episodes of shows long gone the way of reruns and retirement; the glow of her screens was a regular sight after a long session like the one Argo had just finished. “Hey missus,” she said as she opened the door and looked down the dim path to Ada’s bright face. “All locked up on the other side. Anything you need here?”

Ada waved her off, and Argo didn’t stay to second-guess the woman. There was a shotgun hidden somewhere hereabouts for rough nights, but there wasn’t much likelihood of trouble. The real problems came in daylight.

Back into the night. Argo unlocked her bike and kicked off the curb into the street. Only a couple of cars out, headlights tracing afterglow on the fringes of her line of sight. About a mile from the museum she stopped at a corner market and turned her second phone on. A silly precaution, she knew, and not bound to fool anyone important, but a part of the larger ritual, hardwired into her. A flood of messages and missed calls came pinging in, but she only paid attention to the one from Neech.

 

> _Milk. Yeast. Something green._

Argo smiled as she tucked the phone away and locked up her bike. It reawakened something in her, this purposeless twist of facial muscles. No one to bear witness, no one to make meaning of this display — and yet, thought Argo, we smile in the dark for the people we love. She grabbed a wire basket from beside the market doors, propped open to catch the evening breeze, if there was one lurking beneath that sultry storm-brow.

Neech wasn’t home when Argo climbed the stairs to unlock the apartment they shared. They shared the flat, an open space above a pizzeria, with three others — all of them night-shift staff at the local hospital where Neech served as administrative assistant to the CEO. The arrangement mostly worked because none of them spent much time at home, and because they’d all burned their way through every other option available.

Argo turned on all of the lights, caught the fading scents of dinner, and spotted a plate on top of the tiny dorm fridge they all shared, sealed in saran-wrap. They never knew when to expect her, but Neech especially made an effort to keep her fed. It wasn’t unusual for Argo to drop a few pounds during a long code or while on one of her many other hunts.

Curry. Which meant it had been Quinn’s turn to cook, and that was good news since neither Lara nor Sun had a lick of skill with a frying pan. Argo didn’t even bother opening the microwave. She opened the windows while she ate, and carried her plate over to the mattress she and Neech shared, hard up against the southeast wall. A low bookshelf and a pile of outmoded electronics demarcated space, reminders that Argo would wake up to her other life, the life that helped her pull her weight in rent money: keeping old iPhones working well past their warrantees, jailbreaking new ones to allow unfiltered messaging, and wiping ransomware. Your average freelance work for a computer tech just a little too off of the mainstream to survive at a box store genius counter.

Argo booted up her laptop and messed around for a few minutes, winnowing through her work email and making up for a few missed meals. But the mattress drew her in, enfolded her in another kind of annihilation. The sheets still smelled like Neech.

 

* * *

 

 

She opened her eyes to a dim apartment. It didn’t feel as though much time had passed, and they didn’t keep clocks other than their phones. Neech stood at the kitchenette, backlit by the stove light. She was pouring over some magazine, her expression unreadable. The room was filled with the sound of rising bread, wet flour and the stink of live yeast. Outside the wind was rising, and rain splattered against the still-open windows.

Argo rose, took the magazine from Neech —  _Time —_ and tossed it aside. A quick hug, a warm hand against the back of her neck. A deep kiss. Comfort, normalcy. Neech was a sea-anchor, Argo the ship. Neither one really ever touched down, but they tethered each other to something different.

“I didn’t want to wake you,” Neech said. Argo’s doings were not to be talked about, not to intrude at home. It was an asymmetrical arrangement and they both knew it; Neech’s cousin Benno, for example, was occasionally allowed to blur the lines between activist and tech, but Neech never did. They both understood that Benno might prove useful in the future, but distrust between the two of them never would.

“It’s okay,” Argo replied. “We haven’t had bread in a while. Where’s the party?”

“The grant came through,” said Neech. “We get another six months for sure, and an option to renew if the terms prove sustainable.”

Even the private hospitals struggled these days. Six months of certainty felt like a luxury. Argo squeezed Neech’s hand, kissed it, then let her go.

“Did you just get off?” Neech nodded. “Good. We’ll be up around the same time then. Are you staying up to bake this? I’ll stay up with you if you’d like.”

Neech shook her head, checked the rising loaves. “I need to wind down, and you already are. Wound down. Get your beauty sleep, Argo. And take a shower. I want a pretty face to wake up to.” Another kiss, soft and quick, and a sparkle in her eyes from the oven’s dim light.

Argo drifted back to her mattress and out of wakefulness to distant thunder.

 

* * *

 

 

She was knee-deep in some quasi-nerd’s virus-riddled command architecture when the email came in from Bartón, veiled as spam. But Argo didn’t get spam; she only ever got updates. Beside her, on the floor, Neech lay sleeping off her _Time_ magazine and the stupor of bread-belly. Argo left her phone and backpack in place.

Her bike seat had gotten wet overnight. She should have taken it inside, but she’d be damned if she carried it up and down those stairs every time there was a hint of damp. She swiped most of the water off of the seat and took off, winding her way through streets still slick with runoff. The gutters were choked with the usual debris: empty chip bags, shredded tires, sodden grocery bags, used condoms. After a storm, everything looked clean until you glanced at the storm drain grilles at the bottom of every hill.

She skidded to the stop at an intersection six blocks from her final destination; the lights were out and a uniformed policeman was waving traffic through. His car sat parked nearby, its lights flashing but siren off. The red-and-blue flared across the thin skin of petrol rising through the wet asphalt. He looked bored, calm, and entirely oblivious to the very people whose lives he interrupted for the duration of their crossing.

But he was still a cop.

Argo raised a hand in thanks as he waved her on, lungs tight and chest cooling with concentration. His presence was unconnected to her little trip, but she still couldn’t help feeling the layered burn of anxiety etching away at her thoughts. She pushed it away, pedaled onward. She took a little longer getting where she was going, just to make sure of what she already knew — they’d succeeded, there was no danger, all was well — and slid off her bike with a casual flourish to remind herself she still could. The gravel crunched beneath her feet as she walked the bike up a narrow alley between outbuildings. This was a mixed residential neighborhood, and there were plenty of houses emptied by the recession to choose from. She had eyes for only one. At a break in the falling-down back fence, she turned in, checked under an overturned cinderblock.

A scrap of paper. Bartón was Old School, defended his methods even when the others didn’t question them. So far they’d had no trouble. She read the message.

 

> _12 minutes, 43 seconds._

That was all. But it was all she’d needed. Twelve minutes and thirteen seconds of access to the Monsanto servers, and the country’s agriculture industry would never be the same. It was all done. Every line of code had already run that would run, and the effects were all in play. Everything that would follow was already underway.

Argo didn’t smile this time, but she put the paper in her mouth and let it sit there a moment, tasting the ink and the elements it had absorbed in the hours it had sat under that brick. She felt it softening under her tongue, felt a soft wistful pang of sadness as the ecstasy of success slipped out of her grasp. There was no joy in righting a wrong like the one they were hoping to; there was only the work, the necessity of it, the wrenching pain of realigning the world back towards the path it should have taken but never truly would.


	3. Benno // Tucson

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Benno travels East, to Tucson, to take charge of some particularly special pieces of Wall. While there, the Donald makes a surprise appearance. Chaos, predictably, ensues.

 

 

 

## Tucson Amtrak Station // Tucson, AZ

_lose the spark_

_and justify the dream;_

_but also worthy of remark_

_will be the color scheme_

**— _New Yorker_ , 194x***

 

* * *

 

 

Benno waited on the platform with his hands in his pockets, watching the crowds gather. He’d driven a little over four hours of desert highway to be there on that wide strip of concrete amidst the throng. He felt the spark of it, the interest rising around him in a vortex of hot breath. But he was struck, too, by a different emotion altogether — a quick but heavy wash of wistfulness, and nostalgia. Trains had always worked powerfully upon his imagination, it was true, but even that couldn’t explain the unexpected clench in his chest as a cheer went up — one of many rushes of sound to sweep over the assembled people in expectation of what was to come. But like many of the other cheers, this one was a false alarm.

The train was late. Nobody was particularly surprised, but that didn’t keep the already disaffected college students, the older men in cheap colorful shirts — sweating under their polyester collars in the pre-noon heat — and the women in sun hats and long swanky cotton-weave dresses from manifesting their nervous energy as a series of tics, shifts, and jolts up against their neighbors. It was a shoulder-to-shoulder business, this combination exhibition and inventory.

The train was carrying part of the Wall. The “pretty bits,” as he liked to think of them, the portions carrying bas-relief carvings of American history and inscriptions courtesy of right-wing leaders the world over. Notably absent were quotations from Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin — but the President had managed to worm several of his own favorite sayings into the mix, so the collection as a whole resembled a pastiche of declarative statements vaguely related to the twin notions of strength and beauty as related to national identity.

Benno’ favorite carving pictured a four-by-four-foot relief of former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s head looming over the inscription: “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.” The fact that this arrangement had not merely been approved but actually selected by the man currently walking the storied halls of the White House gave Benno no end of sharp, visceral joy. That it had been ratified by any number of other tastemakers and brought into being by countless designers, sculptors, and other artists who had been willing to attach their names and reputations to the project was nothing short of mortifying for any country with taste — but then, Benno reflected, no one was saying their country had _that_ anymore.

He’d seen the sketches because he was himself to be responsible for installing no fewer than thirteen of the carved panels. No one had, apparently, informed the Powers that his work was likely to be seen only from the blurred windows of passing vehicles on Mexico’s Federal Highway 2, which ran within spitting distance of the border for much of the length of the BMGR as well as the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, where visitors were warned not to touch any unexploded bombs they might find while visiting the final resting place of Edward Abbey, author, activist, and anarchist. Benno had tried reading some of his stuff, but hadn’t been able to get into it after Argo spoiled everything (as she always did) by telling him a little too much about Abbey’s background. It wasn’t the links to eco-terrorist groups like Earth First! that put him off so much as the author’s evident — to Argo, at least — sexism and archaic understanding of science in its relationship to industry.

But that was a thought for another time, thought Benno as the white noise around him resolved into a single collective cry:

“The President!”

God, no. Not him again.

And in an instant, the crowd became a seething mass of unrest, cell phones scraping the bare blue vault of sky. Over the chaos came the sound of engines, and the beat of a helicopter. A half-dozen black sedans approached the security fence on the opposite side of the track and slowed, tires skidding in the gravel as the helicopter dipped into sight and circled. It would have made for quite the signature grand entrance had there not been countless power lines and telephone poles and elevated lights cluttering up the area; the helicopter lifted and slid across the sky before settling some distance away in a slow, careful landing. No flourishes here, thought Benno with some satisfaction as the mass of people behind him began pushing forward, towards the edge of the platform.

A man emerged from the helicopter, pale and blue and orange all at once, just a vague bundle of importance flanked by larger bodies in flat black suits. They bowed their heads under the fierce draft of the slowing rotors and came towards the platform, just as some other voice pitched a quick “It’s coming!” into the mix.

Suddenly, everyone was moving — pushing, shoving, beating at the wall of human bodies before them. All while that one voice was drowned out under the weight of “The President! The President! It’s him!”

A cry. Someone had fallen from their elevated slip of concrete, and others were now leaping down as well, jumping the tracks and sprinting towards an audience with the man himself, the ultimate Power. For a moment it looked as through the entire crowd might spill over and drown him right there on the tracks, but the President stilled, fell back, was surrounded immediately by Secret Service. On the platform, station staff and a small contingent of local police were pushing back at the margins, shouting, unheard, over the din.

But then the train was coming for real, looming practically the instant it was visible, ballooning into being as it came down over the bridge crossing E Broadway. And people were on the tracks, unsure of which way to go — back towards the station? Or over and beyond, to bask in the immediate presence of the President, now invisible behind his own private wall of humanity. The train’s horns blasted — all four of the lead engines blaring seemingly at once — and brakes screamed. Clearly, the train had been prepped for a grand entrance of its own. It came to a stop well short of the crowd, and the people coalesced in a fan before it. The train’s driver was waving wildly, gesturing people to move, but to no effect.

Then he began inching forward, pulling the slow ponderous mass of tarped objects along with him, until it became clear he intended to pull the train up to the platform and nowhere else. Most of those who had willingly gone down on the tracks might have gotten back up again, only the powerful draw of the President on the other side kept many of them there, and the platform was now full to the edge and getting more packed very second that passed. The crowd split, and the train came slowly up, and as the engines passed Benno looked up just in time to see the crew lean out, faces broad with heat and frustration. It gave one final shuddering lurch and fell back on its brakes with a grating sigh, and the elderly men on the platform suddenly realized they were separated from the President. They began to cry out, and rushed the train, beating on it with their bare fists and kicking at it with sandaled feet.

Benno caught himself on a bench and stayed there. He looked across the roil of inspired — and angered — people with resignation. This was what all surprise visits turned out like, he figured. Absolute chaos. No doubt someone had thought it would be good PR to send the big man down here to inspect the result of his work, but like always they were going to have to explain away a couple of broken legs and flayed reputations.

Out of the noise came the beat of rotors again, and consternation — was he leaving already? — and the helicopter dropped into view just overhead, the sight and sound and wind of it pushing the crowd back. The police locked arms with Secret Service in some poor parody of riot control and blocked out a rough twenty feet of concrete. The President was escorted in between carriages, leaving the crowd on the other side blind and furious at their miscalculation. They could hear the thunder of their hands and feet on the train’s open beds as they climbed up for a view. Meanwhile, the President was attempting to speak, only no one could hear him or see him over the din. Someone came through the crowd carrying a chair from inside the station, and he was helped up onto it with the fumbling assistance of two Secret Service agents who clearly didn’t like the situation. But he waved them off, and they went back to eying the crowd from behind impenetrable glasses. Benno could even spot the little silver tags denoting them as smartware. Everyone’s faces were being scanned and cross-checked against databases, he supposed. He felt a rush of adrenaline to his face, the same rush as when, looking up into his rear-view mirror, he spotted the telltale blue-and-red of Highway Patrol.

The President was speaking again. The helicopter beat its way off again, and the world became the province of human voicAt first those hissing for silence actually raised the noise level to a new peak, but at long last the widespread _hush_ and the gesticulating hands of their Commander in Chief brought the crowd to stillness. He could at last be heard.

“ — beautiful, very very beautiful. A lot people tell me this will be the, ah, the absolute most beautiful piece of architecture they’ve ever seen, and I have a lot of very smart people tell me this, and I think, you know, they’re right. They’re absolutely right. And I wanted to be here, I really did, to see this wall go up, to see the Troia become reality, and to thank the good people of Tucson, some of my favorite people really, for making this wall a reality the way it is going to be very soon — ”

The good people of Tucson were practically glowing. Nevermind that they’d neither been involved in the design nor the execution of the Wall’s long-delayed completion. They were touched by the President’s approbation. They basked in it. They — god help them — saw themselves in the bas-relief busts and in the quotations too, having cake and eating it with abandon. They were Trump’s very favorite people, really, and they were good strong Americans with barely a brown hair or inch of dark skin between them. They saw themselves in everything the President unfolded before them as the tarps were laboriously taken down and let fall in ripples of heavy plastic around the wheels. They saw themselves and they loved what they saw. They were alive with pleasure, pleased even with the bruised elbows and scraped shins that marked their survival of this crazed, hectic morning.

Trump raised a hand against the sun, squinting out at nothing while the sweat beaded on his forehead. He rocked briefly on the chair, its feet clearly unevenly placed on the platform. He fell silent for a moment. Benno could see it from fifty or more feet away, a soft glitter of skin paling under the unblinking sun. If the Secret Service wasn’t careful with him, thought Benno, the President might collapse with heatstroke right then and there.

But it was not to be. The President rallied after a long pause, and finished with a flourish:

“Now let’s go kick some immigrant ass!”

And the crowd went wild. They would have gone wild anyway, no matter what the man actually said, but truthfully there were quite a few on the platform sharing that same sunshine who had voted for the Wall, not just the President himself, and who had been waiting to see this particular promise fulfilled for years. They were the same sort of people, Benno sensed, who were likely to take their airsoft rifles — or god forbid, their regular ones — out to border ranch land and sit there of an afternoon in their air-conditioned vehicles taking pot shots at illegal immigrants crossing someone else’s land. It wasn’t an uncommon thing, this practice. And if they weren’t going after the immigrants directly, they liked to go after the water tanks Border Patrol as well as certain concerned citizens kept stocked for the crossing on the theory that a live and captured immigrant was less expensive to deport than repatriating a corpse.

The Wall wasn’t doing much to keep them out, these immigrants, in its current incomplete state. But it hadn’t done much good even back when it was a fairly-complete security fence. Benno had seen the pictures — a pickup truck with a long flexible ramp that could be thrown up against the wall and taken down in minutes that allowed folks on the Mexican side to simply drive up and down a steep slope into the United States; tunnels dug under and holes blasted through for a temporary quick fix. His team had found a few disused tunnels themselves in the course of their work, but these days so many parts of the fence had been disassembled and were still awaiting their concrete replacements that the border was more permeous than ever.

And the bodies were piling up, as they always did. Survey teams and construction crews and coyote-guided packs of immigrants alike lost their lives to the Devil’s Highway. Some of them were gathered up and shipped home — east to Tucson and then south, for the desperate dead, or north for the unlucky — but many were just left where they fell, if leaving them could be justified. Kind Sonora took them where they needed to go.

At least, thought Benno as he stood in the midst of a maelstrom of flesh, watching as the President tottered and half-fell from his perch to be swept back through the train’s burdens and out to his convoy — at least the desert’s desperate dead would wash up at the foot of Mighty Art, under the shadow of figures fit for a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The crowd began to disperse, still wreathed in the afterglow of their own pure, fierce joy — the kind of joy only they could lay claim to, as good people of Tucson, the good, cruel, deeply American people of Tucson. Benno reached for the papers in his back pants pocket and showed them to the cop standing at the far end of the station, who looked as dazed by the morning’s events as everyone else. He clambered over a low barrier and then continued along the tracks toward the front of the train, where the driver and crew stood in heated conversation with someone else — a woman in an expensive-looking outfit, the back of her silk shirt marked by a long dark tongue of sweat.

“Next time you want to pull a stunt like that, Ms. Mercer — ” the driver was saying, only to be interrupted by the woman.

“Next time? Next time, you don’t goddamn stop until we tell you,” she said, spinning on her heel to confront Benno, approaching soft-footed and unhappily across the gravel. “What do _you_ want?”

“I’m here to take custody,” he replied, swallowing heavily, “of units 47 through — ”

“Never mind,” she cut him off, turning back to the driver and stabbing a finger into the air. “Just do your god-damned jobs, everyone, and don’t bother to fuck up, okay?”

The driver folded his arms, shielded almost entirely by the inscrutability of his weatherbeaten face. Benno had the distinct impression he’d dealt with more colorful characters even than Rebekah Mercer, heir to empires and super PAC heavyweight in her own right. She didn’t wait around to see what effect her words had, if any, but blew right on past Benno and into a phalanx of her own bodyguards, reporters, and assorted hangers-on. He watched her go in astonishment, papers still in hand.

One of the engine crew leaned out of the foremost engine. “Which units did you say?”

“47 through 59,” Benno replied.

“I thought we were dropping those off in W — ”

Benno broke in. “Wellton, that’s right. Someone screwed up, though, and the crews are expecting everything in Yuma for the southwestern sector. Our supervisor’s out on medical so I’m here to make sure everything lines up.” He didn’t add that he’d gotten up at four in the morning to do so, after a night of little sleep coordinating the supervisor’s emergency trip to Fortuna Foothills. Nothing worked as it should. Nothing _ever_ worked as it should. This was the lay of the land, only the desert didn’t forgive mistakes, and turned delays into disasters.

Luckily, thought Benno, I’m beginning to have a handle on those.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * = Originally written to comment on the ornamentation of the Hoover Dam, this poem’s exact date and author are unknown to me at this point; I have made inquiries to the New Yorker for details. I believe in full attribution so I will get that for ya’all, dear readers, as soon as possible.


	4. Mohavi // Fort Worth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Meet Mohavi Lassalle, Animal Control Officer for the City of Fort Worth. His life should be simple, but isn't. Also he's got the hots for a rather prickly veterinarian. That's totally normal, though, so maybe he's as boring as he'd like to be. You decide!

## Animal Care & Control Center // City of Fort Worth (TX)

* * *

 

Mohavi Lassalle lifted the partially sedated doberman out of the rear of his truck, grunting at the weight. The dog’s paws twitched, giving him the same momentary electric shock that waking animals always did, but its head and tail hung limp — safe enough to handle.

“This guy your noon call?” The kennel manager stood by with a clipboard and smartphone, a reel of tags under one arm. “Big sucker. What was the deal?”

Mohavi placed the dog carefully on a rolling cart so that the other man could tag him. “He’s a traveler. Found him almost two miles from his owner’s home, stopping traffic during the lunch rush hour while he went at the cars. Seems to have a taste for tires.”

“Not a simple citation, though?” The other man bent to check for a collar, then ran the phone over the dog’s body until he found the microchip. Mohavi folded his arms and watched, knowing what he’d find. “Ah. Already registered.”

The City of Fort Worth had a rigorous system in place for dealing with violent pets, and this one had already been run through the system — multiple times. He was a fine-looking animal, well-fed almost to excess, hide rippling with subcutaneous fat and coat a lustrous palette of rust, caramel, and honey blended into steel-grey and black. All he lacked, thought Mohavi, was a set of owners who cared enough to train him or at the very least keep track of his whereabouts. Most of his offenses wouldn’t have happened, period, if the doberman had been watched properly. As it was, careless owners had let a harsh world transform their stray dog into a dangerous dog. And the doberman would bear the punishment.

Mohavi shook his head sadly, as he often did. His job as an Animal Control Officer grew ever more complicated as the economic downturn thrust increasing numbers of pets out onto the street. The shelters were full up, and some had been forced out of business altogether after charitable donations started to dry up and government grants expired without renewal. The queues at foster programs grew ever longer as more and more pets needed homes and fewer people had the financial security necessary to take them in. It wasn’t even the shelters’ restrictions that were slowing things down — there simply weren’t enough people out there willing to adopt when they couldn’t afford basic necessities like medicines or bus fares.

Thinking of medications left Mohavi’s head a-buzz. He felt for his blood sugar monitor and ran a quick prick test. He’d once thought of purchasing the implant devices so popular a few years earlier, but at the time he couldn’t justify the expense and now he was simply glad not to have fallen victim to a regional hack last year — a hack which had sent no fewer than three hundred individuals to the hospital. The mortality rate went down as soon as the doctors realized what was going on, that the insulin pumps in the implants were releasing all of their stored doses at once, flooding patients’ bodies with far too much all at once. But forty-three diabetics lost their lives that week, and the implants were still being described as “mostly safe, and highly convenient” by doctors. Meanwhile, Mohavi continued with his manual self-monitoring and a heavy skepticism. Speaking of insulin, his was costing almost three times as much as it had a year earlier; he’d have to speak to his doctor soon, and he dreaded the co-pay.

The kennel manager was still going through the dog’s file, his eyebrows raised, when his favorite veterinarian exited through the loading dock door, yelling something over her shoulder that sounded suspiciously like “ — you salty bitch!” Which, well, wouldn’t have been all that unusual for Katerina Hammond, who attracted behavior citations the way that her newest patient attracted dogfights. She raised a hand to shade her eyes from the sun and spat on the sidewalk, wiping a gloved hand on her heavy-duty coveralls.

“Shit, Dom, aren’t you going to let Havi bring him in? We’ve got a free cage for once and we can’t afford a lawsuit for letting another chihuahua die of fucking heat stroke.” She did a double take. “Not that he’s a chihuahua. But still. Let’s be humane.” Katerina was the only person Mohavi let call him by a nickname, mostly because she was completely deaf to his pleas to use his full Sesotho name for reasons to do with respect and dignity. “Havi” simply held no meaning except for when she used it.

Dom shrugged. “He’s a shredder, doctor. He’s had his final warning, just last month. The owners are probably to blame but we can’t waste time on him, okay?”

“God fucking damn it. God damn god and all this madness.” Katerina looked to Mohavi, a quick sidelong look with weighted meaning. “I hate killing dogs. I really hate killing dogs.”

Subtext: _Can’t we just let him go?_

“So do I,” said Mohavi. “But I hate having to pick up the same dog a dozen times even more.”

Subtext: _No_.

She hooked a cigarette pack out of a deep pocket and lit up, her face scrunched up the way it did whenever she was mentally flailing against the patriarchy. “Couldn’t we — ”

“No,” replied Dom and Mohavi the same moment.

“Havi,” she said. “Havi, we can’t keep killing dogs. I can’t do it.”

Dom shrugged, plucking the cigarette from Katerina’s fingers and taking a deep pull before returning it. “Can’t save everyone, doctor.” He flicked a finger at Mohavi. “Don’t bring him in unless you’re ready to do your job, man. Plenty of people would kill for a nine-to-five with benefits, better qualified and hungry.”

Subtext: _You’re a black man in a white world, now._

Mohavi didn’t move, didn’t trust himself to speak. He understood what fueled Dom and other men like Dom, but he himself felt no inclination to anger. A deep sadness settled over him like wet canvas as the other man went back inside, letting the heavy door grate shut behind him like a broken jaw. He leaned over the doberman, whose tail was beginning to beat against the metal cart surface, and felt Katerina draw up beside him the way he might sense a live wire. He shifted slightly away.

“Doesn’t he know you got a Master’s from A&M? Who the fuck does he think he is?”

“Katerina,” Mohavi said evenly. “He’s not really worried about my qualifications. Nobody wants to hire a black man, no matter what their degree — ”

“Astro-fucking-physics, Havi. You could have gotten a doctorate. You could have been the next Neil de Grasse Tyson. And you’re picking up strays.” She tossed the cigarette down, crushed it underfoot, staring directly into his face. The intensity of her anger was unendurable. He stayed still, staring down at the dog while Katerina shook out a second cigarette.

“You know it’s not his fault that I had to leave the program,” he replied after a long pause.

She shook off the ashes. “He voted for Trump. So that kinda makes it his fault.”

Mohavi shook his head, smiling slightly, refusing to engage. “And it’s bad for everyone if I have to leave the country all of a sudden. That’s all it is. So many people having to leave — there’s no stability. He’s just upset by the situation.”

“His racism is enabled by the situation,” Katerina hissed, but quieter now. More thoughtful. “Have you ever even _been_ to Lesotho?”

Mohavi put a hand on the doberman’ neck, felt the carotid pulse beneath his palm. “My parents went back when Pop died, to spread his ashes in the mountains. But I was four and that was during the Bush administration, so they left me with an aunt in Albuquerque. I don’t even speak Sesotho, not properly.”

“But they might deport you anyway.”

“I’ve got a while to work out what to do,” said Mohavi. “My parents are more at risk, since my father let his work visa expire. My mother and Pop came here legally. It’s complicated.”

Katerina sighed — a deep, sincere sigh. “No shit. But I meant what I said.”

“That you’re done killing dogs? I heard you. But they’ll fire you for it.”

“Already have, Havi. Well, practically. I’m under extra supervision. They think it was me who set up that Kickstarter for a no-kill shelter in the burbs.” She laughed, deep in her throat. “The _burbs_.”

“You would’ve done it,” Havi said quietly, “If I hadn’t.”

She shot him a look, put a finger to his lips. Her cigarette wreathed head in smoke, making his eyes water. “No, no. I did it, it’s fine, I’m white and my parents are good church-going Catholics. They can fire me and nobody’s all that worse off. Not really. I bet I could even run a truck over the next shipment of pentobarbital and not see the inside of a jail cell. I’m a big fucking white girl.”

Mohavi took her hand away from his face, gave it a quick squeeze. He knew she felt bad about being white, like a lot of self-aware Americans, but she took it a little far. Her latent self-hate was one of several reasons they’d never actually dated, why he’d never accepted any of her (many) invitations to go out for a drink after work. Loving Katerina was like loving a fire in an enclosed space: you had to be careful, lest she eat up all the oxygen. But love her he did, so he let her lean against him as the dog began to stir, her cigarette burning up to its filter, forgotten between her fingertips.

“What do we do now?”

“I guess we either start lying, and return the dog — or we start lying, and keep the dog. Either way — ”

“ — either way,” she said, gripping his arm, “We do it together.”


	5. Neech // Washington, DC

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Neech makes coffee and learns a little of what Argo has been up to--and how her partner's hactivism could impact her own life and work.

## George Washington University Hospital // Washington (DC)

* * *

 

Neech woke to the muddled smells of the hospital staff break room. It was always the smells she noticed first about a place — and here it was sweat. Sweat and antibacterial hand cleaner, bleach, and the vague tang that fluorescent lights gave off when they get close to busting a fuse. She straightened up from the bench, unbundling the crumpled jacket which had served as a poor man’s pillow, and checked the clock.

She’d taken the Blue Line in almost thirty-six hours earlier, absurdly early on a Thursday morning, but that was the only way to avoid the terrible press of bodies flooding in once the day edged into a more reasonable hour. It was also the only way to make sure she got in to work on time, given the inevitable delays and cancellations. Today it had been track work between Braddock and the Airport, a long and mostly straight stretch of tracks winding along between the wide Potomac and the meat and gristle of Alexandria’s bulk, the inroads to Washington. Just past the leveled grey fields of runways blocked in with all the attendant hangars, warehouses, and parking lots, the metro hooked west and looped north through Crystal City, Pentagon City, and Pentagon stops before sliding along the eastern edge of Arlington National Cemetery before reaching Rosslyn and crossing the river and leaving her washed up on the platform at Foggy Bottom — and at the entry gates to GWU with its hospital.

Technically, Neech shouldn’t have worked the hours she routinely did. The reality of her situation was, however, messy and terribly hard to match up with the expectations she’d been raised to embrace. Her boss, highly intelligent as well as dedicated, organized, and compassionate — made for a competent Chief Executive Officer, or would have in better times. Harvey Rutledge had more than a decade in clinical experience, and rather fewer in operations and administration. Neech herself had been at the hospital for eight years and already she’d seen a complete turnover in Chief Officers — two complete turnovers, actually — as well as in the membership of the hospital’s Board of Directors. Certain hands gripped the reins with white knuckles, she knew, and the University proper had faced its own challenges including trial by combat, sudden coups, and the ravages of corporate opportunism as traditional academia imploded nationwide.

All this meant a lot of change, a lot of paperwork, and a lot of jockeying for position amongst the administrative staff. Neech had hung on to her own hard-won position by the skin of her teeth, rendering herself so necessary to each incoming wave of officers that the office structure basically depended upon her constant presence. There was no corresponding bump in pay for all the hours of sleep she sacrificed to her job — of course — but the fact she could still count on a regular paycheck counted for a lot.

And besides, thought Neech as she pulled herself back onto her feet and began her traditional hunt for caffeine, there was only ever occasionally a reason to go home. She didn’t mind a whit what Argo got herself into so long as they saw each other a couple times a week. Nobody had ever cared to keep pace with Neech, so a semi-committed relationship felt like a luxury, an unexpected affirmation of Neech’s latent humanity. She could count the totality of thirty-five-odd years of sexual partners on one hand, and no relationships to speak of save that one three-month fling with a TA in college.

Argo was perfect. Argo didn’t need Neech, which struck Neech as providential, since Neech didn’t particularly need Argo and didn’t favor asymmetrical relationships. They’d arrived in each others’ lives and found they kind of liked the sum total of what they had to offer, while neither of them asked for more than the other could reasonably give.

Neech banged open a couple of cabinets and shuffled through a collection of other peoples’ shit before she found the good coffee. It was getting late, and an executive session of the board was meeting on site — which meant that Harvey Rutledge, CEO, would need a good cup of coffee in approximately twenty minutes. Board meetings were at best contentious, and at worst — well, at worst there might be a new shuffling of the pack. It was unlikely that Neech would find herself under a new boss in the morning — as an excellent administrator and superlatively gifted spy, she had quite a good sense of what would be discussed and when — but there was always a need for significant postmortem work, actual action. Tonight’s meeting would be one for the books; Neech’s grant had gone through, the funding was in, and now the special interests were back despite very narrow parameters for its allocation. Everybody wanted a slice.

Behind the good coffee sat a tin can of Folgers, one of the ones with a lid of soft red plastic. She left the cabinet door open so that she could look at it while she cleaned out the coffee maker —  _again_ , since the assistant to the Chief Financial Officer was terribly unfastidious — and spooned whole beans into a little pocket grinder she kept in her own office drawer. She counted the beans, slick toasted bodies sliding blackly into the little bowl with its blade, and let the roar sweep her up in an eddy of warmth and wakefulness. And the dry rustle of fresh grounds tumbling into a crisp filter , the cheerful burble of water rising through the percolator— there was nothing better. Except, she thought, still glancing at the Folgers, there was one thing. A terrible thing, but a reliable thing.

Inside the tin can, nestled deep beneath the stale crystals, were six doses of Adderall. There had been more, a lot more, once upon a time. But it was a point of pride with Neech that she’d never once used any stimulant for more than a year. Addiction was a difficult word for her to parse, but she had slowed her consumption to what she considered sustainable levels after each spike corresponding to a period of uncertainty and change at work. And there were plenty of drugs about; she didn’t technically need to hide them in a gross old can, but she didn’t like having them in her desk drawer.

The coffee maker hissed, and steam blossomed from the base of the glass pot as the hot plate met stray drops of sink water. Neech let herself indulge in one — all right, five or six — deep breaths, inhaling the scent of a rich arabica blend. For just a moment she was someplace else — someplace with lush hillsides and craggy limestone cliffs, perhaps, or tame monkeys plucking berries from high bushes — and then it was time to check the clock, close the cabinet door with a determined steady hand, and find a good clean mug for her boss.

* * *

Almost immediately after delivering the steaming cup to Harvey’s elbow — his face drawn and pinched and a clear warning against proximity — Neech returned to her desk and regretted her decision to hold out against those delightful, oh-so-useful orange-and-cream pills. On her desktop, a little message sat front and center, unadorned and functional in characteristic Argo fashion. A black box, an unblinking cursor. Neech rarely got one of those, and whenever she did it signified something uncomfortable and troubling — at minimum.

> _Your Bayer grant is poison._

Neech sank into her seat feeling something halfway between shock and blind fury. Argo had never, never interfered with her work before. Argo had always so perfectly understood the unspoken terms of their relationship; she’d never even taken a position on any of Neech’s projects. More to the point, Neech hadn’t even told Argo about this one until after it was in the bag, so if Argo was making some sort of move it was in the margins of what was acceptable in their relationship.

Neech hit enter, and the cursor moved to a new line. This wasn’t just a message, it was an invitation to talk. She leaned back in her chair and contemplated the screen, repelled by it and all of its implications. Then she reached for the keyboard.

> _This is work. What is this?_

She immediately regretted framing it as a question. Her fingers wrapped themselves up into fists, and she pressed them against the surface of her desk, bowed her head, tested the tautness of neck and jaw. God damn the real world and all of its complications. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to _know_. She just wanted to work, to smell coffee brewing and bread rising every now and then, to walk along the Potomac under a sturdy umbrella in the rain.

Argo’ reply came almost immediately. Neech had to squint to pick out the message from that throat of black box inking the middle of her vision.

> _It’s Monsanto. Bayer bought them back in 2016. Long story, but Bayer has a long history of inventing heroin and tangling with Nazis and pushing drugs into production with hair-raising fine print._

Yeah, well, thought Neech. Big Pharma was evil incarnate, and everybody knew this. It just so happened that everybody was completely impotent in doing anything about it, since Big Pharma was Big Money and cast rather a long shadow in her world. What are you going to do, if you have no money and no foot to stand on in the gladiatory arena of corporate lawsuits? Most gladiators found themselves out of a job — and credibility. Big Pharma crushed all comers.

> _So?_

She didn’t know what to expect. Certainly not the florid lines of text she received immediately after.

> _It’s not just Bayer money paying your bills now; it’s Monsanto money. They are going to move on UHS next month to turn your hospital into an experimental playground._

UHS, or Universal Health Services, Inc. was the fond father conglomerate to a corporate subsidiary that also, coincidentally, co-owned the George Washington University Hospital along with the University proper. They held an eighty percent interest, making them the primary force to be reckoned with.

Neech pressed fingertips to the soft skin behind her temples, felt the network of blood vessels just beneath the surface throb with a liquid violence. All the god-damn loopholes Congress had opened over the last few years had turned untouchable institutions into very, _very_ touchable objects of corporate interest. Nonprofits were gobbled up, levied like crowbars against government institutions. Corporate accounting, always a creative art in its own way, had become a warehouse for private interests. Offshore banking, long thought to be a shadow economy operating parallel to the quote-on-quote “real” economy, had more or less become recognized as the _only_ economy. The average small business simply couldn’t play on the same field, was blocked from access to the tools of the multinational conglomerates, and bled pennies into the uncaring cracks between the cobbled avenues of the lost.

And a hospital, even a really fantastic hospital that had — in Neech’s mind — done everything right to weather the storm, was doomed either to fail or to be subsumed into yet another arm of America’s true passion: capitalism. Profit before people.

Neech hit the return key, let it sit unwavering before her, a steadiness she did not feel, that she never felt when she thought too long and hard about where the money came from and why and where it was going and who benefited from it being there. She shifted some papers on her desk, idly, not really because she had to; after a marathon spell at the office she’d actually tidied almost everything away in anticipation of whatever mess would come tumbling out of the board meeting and slide to a stop on her plate.

There was only one true reliable truth in her life, Neech thought. It wasn’t Argo. It wasn’t even her work. It was the inevitable fact that always, always, the world was out to screw the peasants.


	6. Melania // Trump Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's where I take a moment to remind myself this is just fiction. Juuuuust fiction. No malice or hostile intent involved. But damn, if I'm not worried about someone misinterpreting my writing. I never worried about this in graduate school ... what's wrong with me? Is it because this is the first time in fifteen years that I've even read fanfiction, much less written it? I love fanfiction! I love its role in society! So what has my heart rate up so high? I DON'T KNOW I'M SO SORRY. 
> 
> Anyway, here's Melania Trump, being Melania Trump and a mother and possibly even a bit subversive.

 

 

## Melania Trump // Trump Tower, New York City (NY)*

* * *

* * *

 

 

She sat in her tower of gilt marble, overlooking Central Park, hooded in fog and the haze of a hundred years of industry. It didn’t look dirty; it looked, like everything else her eyes touched, golden and impossibly close. Everything pressed in upon her all at once, welding detail upon detail and etching them all upon the backside of her eyelids so that when she blinked, the world flared with a hundred thousand concerns she could never answer to.

Dawn gathered its purpled cloak into a tight fist and ripped it free of the city in one slow yank of rising color. Down in the streets the city that never sleeps was roaring back into first gear, streets slick with gasoline and reeking of human hunger, human wastefulness not far behind. Or so Melania pictured it; she hadn’t spent much time at street level in the last few years, not after the first concerted series of car bombings and the Secret Service put snipers on the terraces outside. But she remembered, or liked to think she remembered, what life out there tasted like. On the tip of her tongue, she had savored it, the vim and the vigor and the rush of women’s bodies enfolded in billowing cocoons of shot silk and soft linens, their wrists and earlobes aglitter, their heads bowed beneath the weight of finely wrought chains set with jewels. Of the men, she thought little, at least the common men. And most men, she thought idly, were exactly that and little more than the assemblage of unexamined desires.

The skyscraper she called home stretched tall over its base, sandwiched between 56th and 57th streets along 5th Avenue, sharing a block and even its atrium with 590 Madison Avenue, a slightly shorter and substantially less glamorous wedge-shaped building that had once housed the headquarters of IBM. Well, one couldn’t always pick one’s neighbors. Both buildings were, truthfully speaking, rather more typical than special in the New York City skyline; there were other, taller, and more striking buildings to be seen, even from her high-altitude vantage point. For the most part they lay behind her, to the south and a little bit to the west — the new One World Trade Center complex gleaming sharp as a knife in the early morning light, the Empire State Building just a jumble of curves emerging from the pixelated sea of rooftops.

And from each of those rooftops, a glimpse of her world. Melania’s own life a stage set within full view of an unkind world, a hundred — a thousand — blank rooftops, a million windows shuttered away and blinking out at her coquettishly, hiding cruel smiles and the dreams of America’s bleached-bone voyeurs. It didn’t matter that her windows were tinted, were bullet-proof, were a shield against those eyes. It was the minds behind them that gave her pause, the knowledge that what was hers and what ought to be hers would never now be quite one and the same thing. She would never get a day off from being Melania Trump, First Lady, the skin on America’s collective face, God save her.

Whether God was particularly concerned with Melania’s role in glazing an open wound in the American psyche with her precious poise and allure remained an open question. That she was an ornament to American politics and not an active mover and shaker was a given, but even an ornament has power. A power beyond that of the tabloids, of photo shoots and the envy of the impoverished. She could not deny that this power, which elevated her far above the simple concrete tenement in the former Socialist Republic of Slovenia and the life she might have lived had she stayed safely tucked away in amongst its mostly calm and mostly unremarkable citizens. Ah, Sevnica — how little she thought it now. She’d traded concrete for polished pink marble, antique furniture, and a gold-leaf elevator. She’d traded her personal history for a national mythology in a country not her own. And the trade had mostly gone as such trades go. She sat in her sun-shot office, plunged beneath the surface of her own ambition. Submerged in the bated breath of it, the constant ancillary waiting.

She was alone in the penthouse apart from her son, Barron. Her husband — the president — was often away, though rarely in Washington as many in both Houses of government so greatly desired. Her husband’s other children were busy making their own lives, and their father’s, the center of an international narrative and brazen soap-opera for the masses. Even Barron’s private tutors and caretakers had been banished from the uppermost level of the building for the day, ostensibly because he was fighting a cold but in reality to disguise the fact that this tawny-headed teenager was, in fact, nursing a hangover. Not his first, it was true, but the first that Melania had caught him acquiring. The weight of parenting was not, by and large, hers to shift — but this, _this_ required a true mother’s touch. She felt it looping over her shoulders, encircling her neck.

Melania placed a single finger on her desk, between neat piles of fashion magazines and spec illustrations for her upcoming showcase at the White House in February. She pushed that fingertip all the way across the cluttered surface so that it cleared a small path for her eyes only. All the power in the world, and she still wound up admonishing teenage boys like every other mother in history.

 

* * *

  

It was nearly noon before she knocked lightly on Barron’s door, her head light and awash with the unflattering harshness of high sun, even though the drapes still hung thick and heavy in many of their rooms. She felt the whole of the empty penthouse tilt away behind her, slipping around corners on the soft padded soles of absent thought. She took a deep breath, steadying herself against her own motherhood. Soon the noonday meal would be brought up, and it would be allowable to sip, perhaps, sip just a little of something clear and crisp and cool to take the edge off — just oh-so-lightly off. Nothing excessive, mind. Just a little liquid courage, a little chemical gentling. But with lunch would come a whole host of other postponed obligations, and caregivers who would so gladly lift the edge of her tight-wrapped wholeness to expose the canker lingering in the raw margins of her husband’s public life.

One of several cankers, really, Melania thought, but only one of them was _hers_. His other children simply couldn’t be helped; they were beyond her, and always had been. If she’d tried anything ambitious they would have swallowed her whole in the first months of Donald’s courtship, such as it was. They’d pushed many women out of his bed before, and her husband had let them be pushed with all the round-bodied pride of a father of outrage. Still, she thought. Still. She had done alright by herself, all things considered. Not much escaped her, and what did was snapped up and locked away by others for future profit. And nothing at all escaped the press. She prided herself on leaving those gaping maws swinging wide, lapping tongues at her doorstep coming up crumbless.

And thus she stood at her son’s door and rapped.

“Barron?”

The carved wood gave under the light pressure of her knuckles, opening onto an empty room. She ignored the tumbled linens, the duvet slipping, creeping slowly towards the floor, and strode to the intercom. “Agent on duty,” she murmured, managing the hard American vowels with the hard-won finesse of a body accustomed to stumbling on crumpled rugs, to high heels and high society and a very low tolerance for personal failure. That is, she spoke English as well as anyone might, only with an accent that rendered her helpless and soft in the face of unkindness. It was her accent which made her a darling of the old establishment Republicans, with their thousand-dollar designer suspenders and false pockets. She had not exoticized her own femininity, but she knew she represented something the traditional set had thought they’d lost, lost amidst their fearful projections.

Melania hated the lot of them. Making her iron and steel, Old Russia in all her sumptuous gainful glory, smoky back rooms and sex appeal hissing in the shadows. She had not been born and survived childhood a Yugoslav to be taken for an Imperialist now. Never mind that she’d married one, one whose ways were so gauche as to be perfectly transparent.

A voice came back to her over the comm.

“It’s Karl. How can I help you, Mrs. Trump?” A familiar voice, not so much cheerful as overwhelmingly staid.

“Where is Barron?”

After a momentary pause, Karl answered: “The fourth floor public garden, ma’am.”

“Why there?”

His silence held substance, if the kind of substance that might slip between spread fingers or surf the curve of a wave. It was light, tenuous, and yet still trapped them both there. Flies in amber. Then came a distant rumble of helicopter rotors, a passing throb of presence.

She shook herself just in time to hear Karl talking off-speaker. “Status update on Mustang. Who’s with the kid?” Melania waited, as she always did, without projecting either patience or brusque dissatisfaction. She simply waited, poised, unaffected, one hand against the comm panel.

“Mrs. Trump?”

“Yes, Agent Nichol.” She would only ever call him by his proper designation, a small rebellion of sorts. Her husband refused to use last names or to let their details refer to themselves by them, and sometimes he refused to speak names at all. Donald, Melania knew, despised formality almost as much as he despised familiarity. Far better to reduce them all to a broad bland nomenclature of lesser-thans. He did not like that she remembered such little details about such little people, but he also did not quite tell her to stop. After all, to do so would be to acknowledge that he noticed such a trivial domestic point. And so she carried on upholding the order of things, and in so doing, cast her own sliver of shade.

“I can call down, and have him fetched up if you’d like. He’s secure. I believe he is finishing a hamburger.”

Melania brushed her free hand across her hairline, let it linger. “No. Thank you. I will be going down in a moment.”

“We will clear the building, ma’am.”

Another private pleasure, the exorcism of space. She did not thank him again, or even acknowledge that she’d heard. It did not matter; the building would be cleared whether she liked it or not. Not that it took much to sweep the last cobwebs away these days; Trump Tower had been emptied of residents after her husband’s election. Necessity, he’d said, but both of them knew he had no use for others roaming his halls unless they were there to stroke his ego or lend fire to his political machine. He no longer needed to collect a coterie of names to lend his own a modicum of glamour. He was beyond glamor; he had emerged into the inner circle of power, and power, even more than glamor, meant she walked the tiled floors alone, flanked by the voided bodies of the Secret Service. The public could still dine in the restaurants and flow through the atrium, but the elevators were sealed past the lower commercial galleries.

She crossed an echoing space, the hum of distant voices reaching her but faintly beyond the gilded cage of the elevator, and stepped through the open doors to the public garden, each one propped open by the invisible figures which so actively erased themselves from her mind. Barron lay on his back on a stone bench, balancing a plain metal chair on his open palms in some sort of game for which only childhood holds an explanation. He sat up as soon as she came through, looking guilty as he returned the chair to the pavers.

“Aw, but _that’s_ not how it’s done!” cried a voice, and another boy tumbled into view, vaulting over a good dozen of the same chairs, precariously stacked. He stopped short with a soft _ooh._ He might have been eight or nine, a good fine strapping boy with all the lean intelligence her own son lacked. Or at least, he lacked the morning after a solid lecture on the improprieties of indiscreet intoxication — public or private.

Melania regarded the boy with bland curiosity. “Barron, who is this?”

Barron shrugged. “I don’t know, just one of the staffer’s kids. He was already out here when I came, okay?”

But the boys were obviously familiar, if only in the liquid suddenness of youth. The strange boy nodded at her. “You’re Muse.”

“Yes,” said Melania. Not a staffer’s kid, then. He belonged to the agents, with all their silences and functionality. Only, well. Only he couldn’t really be either of those things. “Yes, I am Melania Trump, and I need to speak with my son.” Alone, she might have added but didn’t.

She shouldn’t have needed to glance at her detail, but they were too slow to stay the boy’s slash of enthusiasm. He practically bobbed with excitement. “I’m Jason. Oh, boy — ” he started, then saw the agents around him. “I guess I’ll go, maybe my mom needs me or something. I bet she does. Can’t save the world alone, all that — ” and he darted off, threading his way between agents. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Muse. I mean, Mrs. Trump.”

She hadn’t wanted to know his name was Jason. She hadn’t wanted to know anything about him. It was distracting. Melania sank down on the stone bench next to her son and felt him recede into the distance with a pang of something like sadness. It hadn’t always been this way. It _wasn’t_ always this way. But today, it was impossible for them to play any other hand than that of the hurt. Form dictated it.

As injured mother, Melania regarded the chair. “You should be sorry to your father,” she said, immediately wishing she might say everything that needed to be said in her native language. Or perhaps French. Even German! But none of these were Barron’s domain, for despite her intentions and the near-omnipresence of Barron’s Slovenian grandparents, his father had mandated that English be the family’s language of conflict. And so she spoke English, and knew it meant squandering a winning hand.

“Well, he hasn’t apologized,” Barron said, tone biting.

She let it fall upon her. “For what? He has n — ”

“For everything, Melania.” He’d lost his affinity for the colloquial after a brief intense friendship with his half-brother Eric, who of course never called Melania anything but “My father’s wife.”

Typical teenage bullshit, she thought. Just — typical. “Don’t be simple, Barron. You know he loves you.”

Barron turned to face her, his blind fury blazing in her peripheral vision, but she remained fixed on the chair. “You don’t get it,” he whispered. “You just don’t fucking get it.”

She’d heard more risible language, but not from her own blood. “You will be sorry,” she repeated, clumsily, knowing it wasn’t quite right but implying: _Or I will find a way to punish you._ “He is your father.” _And I have raised you to be better than this._

Barron was heaving dry breaths of deep anger, deep pain. A true teenager. “There's blood on his hands, Melania — so much blood.”

Melania raised a hand to her neck, massaging the drawn muscles. “Don’t be silly,” she said, immediately regretting her choice of words. Didn’t “silly” mean morally loose back in the 1800s? She thought she’d read that somewhere, online.

“The protestors in Wyoming, the drillers, those women whose addresses he leaked and who got shot— and what about that journalist, huh? What about the moms he had jailed because they couldn’t afford funerals for their mis — their miss — for their dead babies? Yeah? And then there’s that family they found down in Arizona, the mother and daughter, what were they? Colombian?”

“Nicaraguan, Barron. But this — ”

“They were trying to get home, you know? They were headed _back_. And we _shot_ them climbing the Wall. We just _shot_ them, okay?”

Melania ran her thumbnail lightly across both eyebrows. “This is all sad, yes, very sad. But it is not real. It is not _true_. You know how they hate your father, so they try to make him look wrong as possible.”

“Who? The _papers_? How could they ev — ” Barron stopped himself, gulped air. Waited himself out. “He’s sued them all, Melania. No one is saying anything important anymore. Not officially.”

“Well, then,” murmured Melania. “As long as it is not official.” She sighed, glanced back at the chair. “We have to get someone to clean all this up. There’s garbage in the fountain.”

Barron gave her a long, level look. “Why? No one ever comes here who matters. Not to you.”

“That is not fair,” she said absently.

He stood, turning his back. “Isn’t it?”

An awkward silence. Melania reached out a hesitant finger, pulled back. She longed to know what the chair was made of, its texture, its temperature. It seemed to occupy the only corner of her mind not churning over the impossibilities — or the improbabilities, rather — of discovering her son cared about the faceless women from those awful social media-fed frenzies taking place, what, every other day now? He was right that the general media furor had quietened down since the her husband’s first successful lawsuit, when it became clear he would do at least one thing he had promised during his campaign. But the lies still leaked out around the edges, and when it wasn’t lies it was just plain impolitic, improprietary attacks orchestrated by nobody-knows-whom.

“I hope I’m not interrupting something important,” came a voice from the doorway, still held open by the invisibles, in a tone that conveyed exactly zero hope of anything of the sort. Melania drew the hair back from her neck and stood to greet Ivanka, her eldest daughter Arabella flickering in and then out of view almost immediately as she spotted something of more interest down the hall. Ivanka let her go, a hint of a smile touching her lips as she faced her stepmother.

“Nothing, Ivanka. How are you?”

“We were having a fight,” Barron interjected. “But I’m going, it’s okay.”

Ivanka’s eyebrows piqued slightly. “Oh? Well, call the big office. You know our father will take your call, no matter how busy he is. And he does want you to call.”

Barron shrugged, again, and ducked his head as he passed his beautiful, serene, preternaturally humane sister. Melania watched him go with the regret of all mothers who know their battles to be ongoing, unwinnable, before focusing on Ivanka.

“I suppose this is business visit,” she said resignedly.

“Yes, I’d say so,” replied Ivanka. “But you should know it’s not business of the official kind.” There was something reticent to her expression, something clouded and hidden. But Ivanka was such a filament of impossibility, thought Melania — all the heat of a Sandra Bullock, with the elocution of an Anne Hathaway and the self-contained glitter of a Nicole Kidman. She’d been born to become what the world would make of her, and yet, here she was! Not quite her own woman but something tangled up in the knotty workings of reification. She knew power, had walked its hallways all her childhood, been swept aside by it and swept up in it and was now laying the sweepings before a broken republic and asking them “What must we feel?”

Somehow, Ivanka Trump had become a heartbeat.

Melania rubbed her arms as if it to imply she felt some chill far more pervasive than that of a New York summer. “How perverse,” she finally said. “You live for official business.” _As do we all_ , she might have added but didn’t. And caught the razor’s edge sheathed within Ivanka’s glance. But with a quick jerk of her chin, Melania sent her detail back through the glass doors into the tower, leaving the two of them alone on the dirty terrace.

“Melania,” Ivanka began, “What I’m here to say — what I’m here to ask — might be something you’ll hate me for, possibly forever or for a very long time.”

Melania blinked, slowly so that Ivanka knew she was listening.

“I’m going to ask you to do something that my father may never forgive you for.”

“Not interested,” Melania said, immediately.

“Just — wait,” said Ivanka, her hands raised, fingers spread. “It’s not what you think. It might even be worse, but I’m beginning to think it’s necessary.”

“You are strange girl, Ivanka.”

“And you have always said you’re your own woman, Melania. Again and again. Years ago, on the campaign trail. Last week on _Good Morning America_. I know how you hate to do interviews. But I’ve never thought you were lying when you spoke about your relationship with my father — how you respect each other — how you each leave each other be to, well, _be_ your own people.”

Melania felt it again, that strange tilting sensation, as if the whole world were being sucked away behind her in a rush of inarticulate purpose. “I am afraid — I do not know what you want. What — ”

“I want to fix it, Melania. All of it. I want to pick up the pieces when this is all done, when my father’s next term is up. Three is enough.”

They regarded each other with the clarity of women who have survived endless waiting, endless abuse.

“You want — ” Melania began.

“ — to run for President of the United States.”

“Well,” said Melania after a long pause, “That is some kind of business. Will you stay long enough to have lunch?”

 

* * *

 

 

>   
>  *** NOTE** : _This is entirely a work of fanfiction, and is intended to depict a future I hope never comes to pass as well as characters who bear a tenuous resemblance to figures of past and present history. It is not, and it should never be construed as, a malicious attempt to smear anyone involved._


	7. Argo // Union Station

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Argo makes a run for it.

## Argo // Union Station, Washington (DC)

* * *

* * *

 

 

“Make no little plans,” master builder Daniel H. Burnham had declared as he drew up the plans for Union Station in the first years of the 19th Century. Well, he’d convinced Teddy Roosevelt — or Teddy Roosevelt had convinced him, and Argo could never keep them both straight in her mind — and mobilized thousands of souls to make his little plan a very, very big reality. The main lobby swallowed her up whole as she came in with a blast of hot humid air and strode across the slick tiled floor. The arches — what arches! — gleamed gold and green and pocked with a thousand skylights — over ninety feet overhead, each skylight a blind eye set in an endless matrix of blind eyes. They’d been neglecting and then restoring this building since it was completed in 1908, she knew, but it still stung that one of their first solutions had been to encase the whole building in a slightly stronger building, one that blocked out all actual sunlight.

Once upon a time, this altar to public transportation might have been fit for a king — or even Donald Trump, with his fixation on granite and gold leaf — but now it was well and truly falling into disrepair. The palatial entryway and arched waiting area still bore the marks of aspiration, but there was litter washing up in all the far corners and the detritus of a hundred thousand wayward souls was not something that could be concealed by some carefully placed scaffolding and the bright glitter of kiosks selling preternaturally useless things at massive mark-up prices.

And beyond the lingering glamor of those Burnham-touched spaces there opened still dimmer horizons, more cluttered and disheveled concourses, their high ceilings obscured by shredded banners and their walls hidden behind piles of boxes and tumbled equipment of dubious origin. The rare overhead light flickered and stank of overheating filaments; signs pointed seemingly anywhere but to their actual destination. Argo took her time shambling along to her own platform, eyeing her fellow travelers with circumspection, the eyes of a person who has been caught in one crowd too many, who has missed all but the least meaningful milestones. Everyone was dressed too warmly for the weather, out of habit or perhaps an ill-fated desire to shield themselves from eyes like hers. Or maybe, she realized with a soft shock, because this was a recession and everyone always wore heavier, darker clothing in a recession — a recorded historical fact — out of a synchronicity of weight and foreboding, or a collective desire to hide fraying collars and threadbare blouses from the more fortunate.

They had moved once more, as a nation entire, to a point where a crisp crease and undamaged stockings were a hallmark of security. And if her fellow foot soldiers were any indicator, Argo thought as she examined a hallway full of navy coats, they were going to be living with that reality for some years yet. A woman clicked by in nude heels and manhandling one of those suitcases that could be wheeled along while standing upright, not talking but listening intently to the cell phone pressed to one ear. Her carefully coifed updo was beginning to come apart, long strands hanging limp, and her lipstick must have been applied in darkness or without aid of a mirror. She looked like the inside of Argo’s worst nightmare: frail femininity, at the mercy of everything, including herself. But the woman avoided Argo’s glance and, yanking at the handle on her suitcase, vanished without giving permission to be thought of that way. She was replaced by a young family of four with heavy bags, the woman Argo took to be a mother walking with one hand firmly gripping a small boy’s shoulder. He might have been six or seven, and his large dark eyes gathered up every fragment of light in the hall only to extinguish them in tears. A girl of two or three gazed, poker-faced and untouchable, from her stroller seat. They stopped at a water fountain to shift what needed shifting and re-strap on the boy’s little backpack, but the water fountain wasn’t working and he cried without sound and without stopping until Argo forced herself to turn away and stump the last leg to her platform.

The 29 Capitol Limited squatted unmoving on the tracks, belly-up against the cracked concrete lip of its berth. Here she broke out into what sunlight there was to be had on this hellish afternoon, Tropical Storm Fernand scraping up the Atlantic seaboard, its eyewall just passing along the Georgia coast and its outer cloud banks fingering everything from the Canadian Maritimes to eastern Missouri to the Florida Keys. It was a slow-moving beast of a storm, cranking up less damaging winds but record rainfall, testing all of the flood-diversion infrastructures in the eastern and south-eastern United States — especially the ones built before the turn of the Millennium, when “a one-hundred year flood” still approximated reality. They’d had, on average, four of these per state bordering the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico in the last fifteen years — inundations matched only by droughts, particularly in the West.

All this to say, it was rather cloudy in Washington, and Union Station felt like it lay in wait of a really good washing. The train’s engine was awake, and only a couple of passengers lingered on the platform, most of them suits dealing with last-minute crises by phone and out in the open air, where they wouldn’t receive glares or have to sit immobile. Argo had to admire their pluck, damp and grim as it was; summoning up any sense of purpose was hard work, and as they paced the cracked and crumbling concrete they exuded something vital. Something immanent. As if they could still impose a little control over their circumstances if they just … _moved_ around a little, gesturing and speaking into their bluetooth headsets.

Argo had deliberately waited until almost the last minute to show up; she didn’t like waiting, always felt vulnerable to other people’s speculation. And there would be plenty of waiting ahead anyway, about eighteen hours of it on the way to Chicago, and another couple of days’ worth with change on the Texas Eagle as she rode the rails south.

She might have gone truly rogue, hitched a free ride the way some of her old mates still did, hopping freight trains as they slowed around turns or left stations with lax security, but she was a little frightened of the people who did so on a regular basis and besides, she needed to arrive at a predictable time and establish a paper trail for her fake name. A really, really thick paper trail. One that served as incontrovertible proof that Arlene Fisher hadn’t simply manifested from the aether like a ghost — that she wasn’t, in short, a fake identity of brief provenance and cobbled together to serve a single purpose. So Argo gave the suits a wide berth and climbed onto the train, feeling the minuscule shift beneath her feet as the train acclimated to her presence — or was she simply making that up? Desperate to feel some sort of tangible presence in the world, exert some sort of quantifiable force upon its workings? Argo brushed such uncharacteristic philosophical musings aside and mounted the stairs to the upper level, noting that the train was even less full than she’d expected from the reports — and the reports had been dire. One of the few sleeper trains serving one of the busiest transportation corridors in the nation, and it couldn’t even fill half of its seats on a weekday anymore. She wondered, briefly, if the more expensive seats were more or less full than where she’d booked a seat in economy.

Argo — now Arlene — traveled light, but that wasn’t unusual. She tossed her backpack onto the empty seat beside her own and contemplated the strange checkerboard pattern of filled seats further down the carriage. How were the poor people traveling these days, if not by train? Planes were too expensive, and many budget airlines were on the brink of dissolution or actively cutting routes. The trains — when ridden the legal way, anyway — were pricey, too. Argo had forked over almost $500 for her bottom-of-the-barrel registration. Buses, then? She just couldn’t picture it, even though she knew an unprecedented number of people were self-identifying as nomadic or as domestic migrants. Many were displaced climate refugees, either from the floods or the droughts or something else; Argo had been hearing about people forced out of their homes in Oklahoma after their foundations fell to pieces from one too many fracking-fueled earthquakes. One earthquake of a 4-point magnitude wouldn’t hurt many, but a couple hundred might leave your house unsafe.

And the fires. So many fires.

Argo shuddered as she slid into her seat, wondering if there was even a slice of country not made dangerous by climate change. Hoping, too, that she wouldn’t have to run from a fire where she was headed. She simply didn’t know enough about what lay on the far end of the tracks, what hazards might await Arlene Fisher as well as Argo herself. She tried thumbing through the Capitol Limited brochure as a distraction, felt the train thrumming to life around her. Her eyes ran along the list of towns they’d blaze through, their main attractions summarized in a couple of sentences, a brief jot of a paragraph. How sad, she thought, knowing how many of those towns lay at the cusp of an abyss, at the crumbling lip of loss. How many of them had already gone over, lay splayed and hopeless in the gathering dust, watching as the big cities ate up their manufacturing jobs, how import and export tariffs designed to keep jobs in-country actually ended up starving small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and even whole massive industries of their primary markets … and of critical materials.

Depressing as shit. Argo folded the much-thumbed-through and dog-eared leaves of the brochure back together and slid it carefully into the little slot from which it had come — not because she was the careful type, but because Arlene probably should be, and she had to make her performance flawless in order to make good on her promises. On her obligations, her responsibilities. She had to make good on the hard work so many others had worked for, train-hoppers and hackers and revolutionaries of all kinds. She had to make good on their desperation.

They’d been shut down, her little network. They’d been shut down so hard you could have heard the snap-crack as they broke all their laptops to pieces, burned all their files and torched all their hardware, and the pounding on their doors all the while as suits like the ones outside this train lurked outside to take them in — or didn’t lurk but broke down their doors with men in batons, private security or police a wholly useless distinction these days. Privatized violence. They’d gone after a titan, not even aiming to cut him off at the knees but just a quick little surgical cut for research purposes, to open up an infection and see what drained out of the wound. 12 minutes and 43 seconds of access, enough data for an entire phalanx of hactivists, which they were not, but enough for their purposes too and a clean getaway on top of all that — or so they’d thought, even as Bartón’s latest protégé had brought the Feds down on their heads to buy her way out of some other tangle of fucked-up consequences.

Argo’d been lucky, damn lucky and not all that excited about it, knowing she’d left Neech behind with a handful of sand threading through her open fingers, knowing she’d left Neech facing the same titan they’d hoped to bring down somehow and without any of the training she’d need to win. The first Argo had known of the bust was a coded text from Ada Revere, the exact code they’d all hoped never to use, the one which essentially meant the whole museum was burned to the ground — lost beyond recovery — and to leave well enough alone. And when she’d done a remote server check she’d found something worse; the place hadn’t burned, but it was more toxic than the Berkeley Pit, where birds landed in the water and died shortly after. It was a raid, and because of her connection to Bartón the Feds were taking it seriously this time, and they weren’t going to turn a blind eye the same way the local cops had done for the museum.

She’d tried to stay away, and she’d tried to _want_ to stay away, but those were not the same thing. She’d watched as, one by one, the less careful or perhaps the less experienced of her friends went dark, or were taken offline. She tried to remind herself that they were good at what they knew, and that many of them would get away, and many of the rest would walk free eventually, having left no actionable trace of their criminal behavior. But she couldn’t know for sure, and she couldn’t interpret the sudden silence of all chatter from the Feds with any sort of clarity, except to note that they clearly knew they were being overheard, and how, and they were done playing games. So Argo, who’d never taken her work home with her but knew better than to think home was still safe, visited each of her caches in turn and destroyed all that was left, then snuck in to one of the apartment blocks just up the street from her own and watched with a strange sense of detachment as Feds came and went, all of them in plainclothes but Feds nonetheless. She couldn’t risk showing her face in Alexandria again — perhaps ever. With a lurch that didn’t come from the train getting underway, Argo felt the realization take her once more. _She could never go back._

Neech had been nowhere to be seen, and without her equipment — now a liability — Argo was powerless to try and contact her at work, to try and gage just how much she’d managed to screw up her girlfriend’s life, professionally or otherwise. So she’d taken the hint, the many _many_ hints that the town was lobbying her way, and she’d beat it north to the cold dead heart — only, it was anything but cold in Washington ahead of Fernand — of the nation, to Union Station with its arched galleries and its dirty corners, and to the Amtrak train slowly making its way out from under the canopies and jutting seams of the decaying platforms. She’d scrounged up a couple of people who owed her favors on the way, gotten what she needed in order to become someone else, someone more like the fictional Arlene, and bought herself a last-minute ticket out of town.

But oh, this wasn’t giving up. This wasn’t _anything_ like giving up, thought Argo, as early raindrops ran in rivulets along the windows. The train was speeding up, but she felt motionless, rootless, the core ripped out of her as she did what she’d always hoped not to have to do: become someone else in order to finish the job. Something fierce and bright and hopeless burned at the center of her, pushing back at the wrenching pain of leaving all she’d ever known, all she’d ever _wanted_ to know. She wouldn’t need her computers where she was going, wouldn’t need to chop out code for hours each night to create a virus, a trojan, a cracked back door. She was become the virus itself. She was going to give them a fever, all right. She was going to leave them bleeding out of the eyes before she was done. She might not be okay afterwards, but who the bloody hell _was_ okay in this world anymore?


	8. Maliha // Oxford

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maliha, secretary to Chelsea Clinton, enters stage left. Oxford University's Heads of Houses convene, unexpectedly, and crash a Clinton Foundation strategy session.

## Maliha ( مليحة) Bukhari // University College, Oxford (England, UK)*

* * *

* * *

 

Maliha Bukhari, secretary to Chelsea Clinton, was running late — as usual, she might have added, if she’d been slightly less out of breath and slightly more inclined to self-reflection. She turned in at the High Street entrance to University College, speeding down Logic Lane with all the limber speed of the truly motivated. She passed any number of students along the way, and a cluster of tourists posing beneath the covered stone bridge between Radcliffe and Goodhart buildings, so famous it had been splashed across every brochure in Oxford’s existence. Maliha knew this because she was clutching three of the aforementioned brochures.

The tourists had no alternative but to make way for her, and they cast her dirty looks which she made note of the way all women of color, especially those who choose the head scarf, are forced to make note of a perpetual background noise awash with distrust and fear. One of the tourists was wearing a worn baseball cap for the Dallas Cowboys, a team in a game she despised on principle. Let them see the reports on sex trafficking at the Super Bowl, she thought bitterly, and stormed onward toward the gap beyond the Master’s Lodgings where she could duck through the wall and cross the gardens to the kitchen and buttery. She had a set of keys and she didn’t hesitate to use them, even if she was still clumsy with the locks.

On the first floor — the _British_ first floor, she reminded her deeply American self, used to a different definition involving ground level — the stairs emptied upon a hallway off of which a number of smallish meeting rooms opened, the most notable of which went by the names Green, Butler, and Alington. But when she threw open the door to the room marked Butler, the spacious room was empty, chairs in disarray around the circular table. Or at least, it was _mostly_ empty. A woman in a white smock was clearing half-full coffee mugs from the cluttered tabletop, and looked up as Maliha ground to a halt before her. “They’ve gone up to Alington,” said the woman, eyes immediately dropping to the delicately balanced tray of mugs in her hands. “They were lucky a wedding just canceled on us. Something to do with a groom having a wandering eye.”

But Maliha was already halfway out the door, nude heels echoing on the hardwood floor. The door to Alington was shut, voices rumbling beyond. She threw it open with typical impatience and strode in, scanning the room for her boss.

Chelsea Clinton sat halfway up a couple of long tables rammed together in the middle of the room, a little off-center as if the room hadn’t really been set up for her, which it hadn’t. She was surrounded by a veritable mêlée, men and women in varied degrees of formal dress gesticulating and talking over each other. Evidently something had happened to prompt all of this, and by “all of this” Maliha meant transforming a small strategy session into an open season free-for-all with the daughter of a former head of state at the center of the chaos.

At forty-four years of age, Chelsea looked worn, but in a good way. The kind of way all women over the age of twenty-five hope they look after a long day’s work, shattering glass ceilings. She’d earned a break from her labors a decade earlier, but steadfastly refused to take it. With her birthday just around the corner, there was still much to do before surrendering to the dying heat of middle age. If she hadn’t of been boxed in by the standing crowd, the afternoon sunlight coming through the windows set deep into wood paneling would have folded her up in a golden haze, much more gentle than the brazen flash of paparazzi cameras.

And she’d had her fair share of those, lately; Maliha was working up quite a reputation for her ability to transform her regular little human self into a semitransparent shield roughly the same dimensions as a drive-in movie screen. Back when those weren’t quite falling down in decay, that is. She reminded herself of her special powers as she cut through the room to stand beside the acting chair of the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

“Would you like me to shout at them?” she asked, only half joking.

Chelsea stayed bent over the stacks of paper on the table, now distressingly scattered after the sudden move from next door. Maliha would have preferred a laugh, but the flicker of a hint of a smile was good enough for the moment. She spotted Charlotte, ten, and Aidan, eight, huddled in a corner with what looked like a graduate student in two-day-old clothes. They were playing a quiet game of jacks, half-attuned to the mess splayed out around the lavish old room.

“Where did they all come from?” Maliha inquired, scanning for familiar faces. There were probably upwards of forty people in the room already, and several more had followed her through the hall door. She spotted several junior fellows and a couple of masters in full regalia, invited members and reasonably to be expected at a seminar. But she also spotted the respected Dean of Christ Church and the Principals of Hertford, Corpus Christi, and Lady Margaret. The Rector of Exeter and the President of Madgalen were circling the room with the Warden of New College, while the Provosts of Queens and Oriel seemed to be in the middle of a heated argument which the Principal of Somerville was determined to martyr herself resolving. At least half of the current list of Heads of Houses — the senior members of each college, title varying from each of the thirty-eight constituent colleges which made up the University of Oxford to the next — were in the room, and many of them had brought along masters and fellows and junior staff. Maliha knew them by appearance, and by the titles they pressed upon her as she stood deliberately between them and the actual object of their attention, who was still pouring studiously over her ruined papers.

She was not at all surprised when another body emerged from the press around her and took her hand by force, shaking it violently if with a smile. “Lem Christofsen,” came the study voice attached, “Assistant undersecretary to Michaels over at the Home Office.”

“Pleasure,” Maliha replied. “But what the hell are you doing here?” And why you, clearly a fresh recruit to domestic service and not some weathered lackey for the Foreign Office? she might have added. The second question was implicit.

Christofsen rocked back on his heels, surveying the scene. “Kind of awful, isn’t it? Definitely the American experiment in democracy at work.” He didn’t seem to want any one particular thing, but he had avoided her question and that, too, carried implicit weight.

Maliha narrowed her eyes.

Chelsea leaned back at just that moment, and touched the back of Maliha’s elbow. “A little order wouldn’t hurt,” she said softly. Christofsen raised his eyebrows, got the message, and settled onto the soles of his feet as if weighing his options. Surprisingly, he made no attempt to talk to the main attraction but seemed entirely content with Maliha herself.

“Drinks later?” he asked, then blanched at her flat look, the swift little sarcastic gesture to which she’d become accustomed, a flick of the hem of her headscarf. This time, she felt a faint pang of regret at his quick retreat, not because she liked the look of him but because she knew she ought to be kinder to well-meaning so-called “colorblind” white men, what with their education and their complete lack of subtlety. And truth be told, Maliha knew the taste of wine, despite her general adherence to _harām_ and the rule of Islamic jurisprudence. She much preferred an open conversation about her specific decisions than the assumptions reflected in a clumsy silence —

But still, there had been something else going on with the man which snapped her back into gear. She nodded acknowledgement to Chelsea’s request and in eight quick steps caught Christofsen by the door. He held it open for her but she shook her head at him.

“Not drinks,” she said. “But I was hoping someone might get me into the Bodleian without all the tourists. And a latte never hurt anyone.” She hoped he could feel her breath on his neck; she was leaning in close with deliberate intent. As invasive as she dared. Demanding.

He gave her a look and, with a nod, left. She got the distinct feeling he didn’t even need her number, that he was wound up in something altogether more sinuous than simple Home Office duties. For a moment she watched his progress down the hall, then shut the door and turned toward the room, summoning her tallest, most charismatic personality. She could feel the force of her efforts stretching her up out off her heels, hitching her chin to the ceiling. Several of the Heads of Houses looked up even before she pulled up a chair and stood on it, raising her fingers to her mouth for a good long whistle.

The room fell dead silent, and even Chelsea looked up.

“I heard there was supposed to be strategy meeting for the Clinton Foundation here today,” she announced, her voice barely cracking under the strain. “But we got you lot, so I guess we’ll make do.” A polite laugh from the far corner, grimaces in between. “Clearly, this isn’t going to play out according to the programs we printed off yesterday, but we can still do better than complete chaos. I invite you all to take a seat.” She glanced around. “That means _now._ ” The chatter didn’t quieten, so she raised a glass and then, with a quick flick of her wrist, shattered it on the carpet.

That had an immediate effect. From Aidan, a quiet “Radical!” in his corner with the jacks. Charlotte wasn’t even looking at Maliha; she was watching the Provost of Oriel with hawkish intensity. Oriel had once hosted Sir Walter Raleigh, a figure of some importance in the ten-year-old’s imagination. She had also made friends with Irish novelist Antonia Logue, a Visiting Fellow at Oriel, who no doubt had spun her some attractive tales about the place. Knowing the Clintons, Charlotte would be selecting her college at Oxford before she matriculated from middle school. Maliha herself didn’t dare look at the Rector of Exeter; he seemed intent on distracting everyone with his visible distaste for her manner of running things.

When the room was satisfactorily ordered and quiet, Maliha locked eyes with Chelsea and nodded. She couldn’t do much; she couldn’t even get to a meeting on time in Oxford traffic, but Maliha _could_ give Chelsea an expectant silence every so often. It was enough to keep her from being fired. She stepped down, and all eyes turned to the figure which had drawn them there. In theory.

Chelsea stood beside the table, one hand resting on its surface. She surveyed those assembled there, and like Maliha, caught some uncertain flavor from the room on the tip of her tongue. “I would feel much more comfortable giving my speech if I knew it was what everyone came for, but I have the feeling it isn’t. So let’s get this out of the way first. Would someone please explain what has happened here?”

She glanced from fellow to master to principal, onward around the room. After a long pause under her direct gaze, the Principal of Somerville stood, slowly straightening her stiffening knees. She might have been seventy, but her eyes were clear and her shoulders back. “Is it true?”

“Is _what_ true?” Maliha broke in, irritation plain in her voice. The Principal stayed turned towards Clinton.

“Your parents,” she answered.

A hollowness seemed to rip through Chelsea, and she glanced back to her own children, both of them watching with intense curiosity. She hesitated, and Maliha felt her stomach drop into the silence. This wasn’t something her boss had wanted to make conversation fodder, she knew. Not just yet. Trump was still reveling in the execution of one of his earlier studies campaign promises: the imprisonment of his electoral rival on charges of treason.

“Yes,” replied Chelsea at length. “Yes, my parents are both in custody. My mother in New York, my father in Georgia. I must stress that the allegations against them are politically motivated.”

“Of course,” whispered Somerville, sinking back into her seat. Chelsea fiddled with the folded lip of one of the reports at the top of her stack.

The Head of Queen’s spoke up.

“Didn’t Canada offer them asylum? Mexico?”

“Both, and more,” replied Chelsea, with a withering stare. “But for a former American head of state to flee the country — for my mother, who has fought for justice under the law of the Constitution to accept asylum — would be to declare the system beyond saving. Unfit for purpose. Broken.”

“Forgive me, but isn’t it?” replied Queen’s, a rusty gentleman in a soft collared shirt. “In need of serious reform, that is.”

“Reform and a scorched earth policy are not even remotely the same thing,” said Chelsea, looking winded at last, after months of fielding the exact same questions, and tired beyond caring. “And plenty of Americans don’t have the option to up and leave when times get tough; I think my parents would see themselves as betraying those who can’t make an escape.”

“But with their imprisonment, your President has gotten all he wanted. He is a full demagogue, now.” This from the Dean of Christ Church, pivoting in his seat to sweep the room. “It is the beginning of the end.”

“No,” said Chelsea. All august heads swept once more in her direction. “This ending had its middle in that first election eight years ago, but its beginning is rooted in a two-party democratic system. It was always going to lead to polarization. To extreme language and extreme opportunists. Its beginning is rooted in Manifest Destiny, in American exceptionalism, in racism and sexism and the Western fear of displacement. Its beginnings may even have germinated on this side of the Atlantic.”

Maliha could hardly bear to look at her boss. She folded her hands and tore at the loose hangnail on her left index finger.

“It would seem to me,” said the Rector, after a long pause, puffing air through his lips, “that this is as much a failure of faith as it is of education. But it is a failure we, the elderly and the Old World both, must bear the burden of rectifying. At least in part.” Heads were dropping, expressions turning inward. She could see the pull of this man, such a different riptide to the one on the far side of the Atlantic. “We may not have enacted the crime, but our blamelessness is the virtue of the self-satisfied, and the privileged. Without condescending,” he said, and cast a pointed glance at Somerville — or was it Maliha, standing just beyond? — “Without condescending, we must act out of the same bond of faith and responsibility all parents hold or ought to hold with creatures of their blood.”

Chelsea waited, patiently, head tilted in a way to imply the weight of it all would simply slide right off of her if she let it. “Break it down to actionable thinking,” she said. “I don’t trade in warm intentions. What is it you want me to do? I run a nonprofit, a foundation. Not a lobby. I don’t even travel stateside, knowing what could happen. I’m entirely too selfish. And realistic.”

“It’s not what we want _you_ to do,” interjected Magdalen, with a shake of his curly head and a fleeting, wistful smile. “It’s what we want to do on your behalf, if you’ll permit us.”

 

* * *

 

The meeting adjourned without Chelsea ever having delivered her planned speech, but with copious references to her papers and the framework she had indeed established for her strategy session. When the last fellow had gone and the room held only the two of them and the graduate student and two sleeping children, Chelsea slumped over the back of a chair, boss turned to secretary.

“What’s left on the agenda for tonight?”

“Nothing,” Maliha said, then hurriedly amended, “At least, nothing for you. I’ll be sneaking into the Bodleian to conduct shady dealings with an undersecretary.” She picked up an abandoned sweater, much too big for her, and slung it round her small shoulders.

“Well I hope he’s a remarkably stunning undersecretary,” replied Chelsea with a thick yawn. “The place is rather grim after hours. Not at all romantic.” But she caught Maliha’s eye and sobered. “Tell me.”

Maliha hesitated. “I don’t know. It didn’t feel like _news_ , exactly, but you have to admit it’s weird, the Home Office dropping by a company seminar. All that talk about Oxford rallying to alter the balance of American politics.”

Chelsea circled a finger on the tabletop. “It certainly feels as though something big is coming down the pike,” she agreed. “Be careful tonight, okay?”

Maliha crossed her heart, only half-jokingly. “I remember. No promises, no commitments, no declarations of any kind.”

“And no comment, if at all possible.” Chelsea yawned again. “Well, at least it’s only a half-mile to our rooms in the dark.” She closed up a folder, shuffled her stack with a weary hand. Maliha tried to suppress a sudden surge of sadness at the sight, a voluntary exile. Daughter of Kings. Well, at least the American equivalent. Of possibility. A woman with the world at her fingertips, and full knowledge of the sting lurking under the skin.

“Hang in there, boss,” she whispered, gathering up her things. “If anyone can bring the heart back to American politics, it’s you.”

“I’m not so sure,” replied Chelsea. “And besides, you’d need a body for it to fit in, a body ready to accept the surgery.” She looked angry, and tired, and alone. But anger was good. It was more than they’d had in what felt like a long, long time.

“Well, I’m off to the graveyard, Dr. Frankenstein.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> #1: PLEASE REMEMBER this is entirely a work of fanfiction, and is intended to depict a future I hope never comes to pass as well as characters who bear a tenuous resemblance to figures of past and present history. It is not, and it should never be construed as, a malicious attempt to smear anyone involved.  
> #2: DONALD TRUMP is president-elect as of the date I post this. But this is still fanfiction.  
> #3: THE NAME “MALIHA” comes to me honestly, courtesy of a friend who sneaks into my thoughts now and then, and who reminds me just by existing as she does to do good, be better, and save the bees. She gave me her permission to poach from real life.


	9. Arlene // Marana

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Argo is no more, which is to say she has become Arlene Fisher. And her work is just beginning.

## Arlene Fisher // Halcyon Garden Estates, Marana (AZ)

* * *

* * *

 

 

Arlene Fisher was a dutiful creature, not at all like her predecessor Argo. Where Argo was abrupt and nested within at least eight shells of cold anger, Arlene was the picture of tasteful restraint. So when the curmudgeonly director of facility services, Mila Raton, handed her the keys to the laundry and took off three hours early for a haircut with admonitions to close on time and _for heaven’s sake to lock up properly you know how old Roger found those teens in here that one time_ Arlene simply nodded demurely and carried on as usual — which is to say, she’d been doing all of the work anyway while Mila read _Real Simple_ and _Better Homes & Gardens_ in the corner by the dryer sheets.

Mila wasn’t so bad. She got a stipend for her pains, or some sort of discount on her rent each month, while Arlene was paid minimum wage. The job came without benefits, but she got to drive one of the village shuttles for deliveries, so that was a perk. And Ed, the official village chauffeur, was a bit sweet on her and kept leaving chocolate bars for her in the central console. He didn’t even seem to mind that she ate the chocolate and reciprocated nothing.

Halcyon Garden Estates was pretty run-of-the-mill so far as retirement communities went, which meant it existed on pretty much an alternate plane of existence to anything Mila had known before. The pamphlets showed broad avenues lined with palatial homes in some sort of prefabricated revivalist pastiche of Roman and Italian styles, open-air fireplaces, a scattering of crystal blue swimming pools, and a recreation center that oozed comfort from its overstuffed couch cushions to its thick Persian carpets — and never were there people in the photographs, just vast empty (but cozy) spaces. Of course it was rather different in person, as Arlene quickly discovered.

Her last load out of the dryer and folded at precisely five o’clock, she inspected her hands. They were both powdery white and angry red from handling the hot, dry linens — red underneath, and white at the surface. She grimaced and reached for the lotion, massaging her knuckles until they cracked. Then it was out to the shuttle with the stacked and sorted piles, each tagged for a specific house.

The streets were, as always, quiet. The afternoon rains had come and gone, leaving the pavement black and slick beneath slowly dimming skies, the mountains black and craggy against the backlit bannered clouds. She left the windows down as she rolled slowly down Homer Ave, smelling the desert waking up to dusk. It was a wild, tangy smell.

The houses were close together and all identical, their facades touched with small individualities to remind passerby that they were, in fact, inhabited by different people. The Jamisons had green-striped deck furniture, while the Petrovich family had grey. The houses were large — absurdly large for one or two older folks aging into twilight — and they filled up the breadth of each and every plot, so that windows faced across four and five-foot side yards into the windows of each neighbor, while three-car garages angled across acres of driveway in order to occupy the maximum space possible.

Mr. McCready was out on his patio, watering the bougainvillea and waved at her as she passed. Arlene stopped the shuttle and leaned out the window, yelling: “Didn’t it just rain?”

“Water-hungry bastards!” he yelled cheerfully back, and waved again before going inside.

Shaking her head, Arlene pulled back away from the curb, taking a right on Charon Circle, headed up a slight incline to the assisted living complex, where the vaguely infirm could live fifty feet from a nurse as well as the bingo table. The two wings of Halcyon Manor opened off of a central arch wide enough for a semi-truck to drive through, over which the cafeteria loomed. Several women with blue-tinted curls were drinking a late evening coffee at a table by the window, serious as always. She pulled around back to where Terrence was waiting for her, and hopped out to help him unload the bedding and towels.

“Doing okay up here at the house?” she asked, handing him a crate.

“Yeah,” he murmured, head down. She hadn’t gotten six words out of him in two months of laundry stops, so this wasn’t actually a shortfall. He was quiet and efficient, and not much of a conversationalist. He was background staff, like her.

Back out through the arch, pulling a careful turn around the central fountain for the coffee club’s benefit, Arlene took a staff alley that cut across from Charon directly to Helios Close, one of Halcyon’s earliest finished roads and home to some of her oldest residents. Tonight she was on delivery duty only, which meant that she used the master key to access the mudrooms and side entrances to deliver fresh linens to immaculate cubbies where the housekeeping staff would find them in the morning.

On and on, up and down both sides of the street, she ducked in and out with all the stealth of an expert, despite only having been entrusted with deliveries the week before. A single “incident,” as Mila so gently termed them, could result in immediate termination — and an “incident” could be as little as making eye contact with a resident or as much as surprising other staff _in flagrante delicto_. As assistant laundress, Arlene was quite literally the bottom of the pecking order.

By the time she pulled around to the last house on Helios, Arlene felt as though her neck was on fire. Her arms ached and she needed more lotion — already. There was no keeping up in this kind of work, just surviving.

Jackson Merton was waiting for her on the stoop, all three feet of him teetering with barely-contained excitement. “Look what I found!” he exclaimed with perfectly enunciated syllables, his eyes brimming with tears of unabashed joy. In his outstretched palm, a fat striped skink lay upside-down, wriggling in distress. Arlene bent down to look to admire the toddler’s discovery, setting the laundry crate beside her.

“He’s lovely,” she cooed. “You must have been really fast in order to catch him.”

Jackson grinned so hard his eyes almost closed, and he gripped the poor skink so hard she had to wonder if it would make it. “Have you shown your parents?” she asked, a touch pensive. If she was found to be encouraging the child’s skink-grabbing habits … _incident_  ….

All at once his little body folded in on itself, and he held the skink up for closer inspection, running a finger down its belly. “Great grandpapa says it’s okay,” he whispered defensively. “Just so long as Mama Kathleen doesn’t find out. You won’t tell her, will you?”

Arlene smiled. “I won’t tell her, if you won’t tell anyone I’m fifteen minutes late with the laundry today.”

She wasn’t late, but the hint of a shared secret was enough to perk Jackson up, and he nodded. “Promise,” he whispered so quietly as to almost be inaudible.

“You’re good at keeping promises, Jackson. I just know it.” Arlene straightened, plucking the crate up off of the curb.

“He’s not the only one,” came a voice from inside the door, and she snapped upright to see Jackson’s great-grandfather standing just inside with a pair of tongs, the kind people use for turning steaks on the barbecue grill. She felt her stomach drop, even though she’d racked up quite a few “incidents” at this particular house already.

Harold Merton was the picture of health — for an eighty-four-year-old retiree with chronic pancreatitis. In his youth he’d stood over six feet tall, but now he stooped well below, his skin yellowing a bit and spackled with liver spots. But he had a good smile, and his eyes were clear. She’d never once known him to make it out to any of the common spaces, but he still drove his own car and routinely flew to Las Vegas for pleasure and to check in on several of his remaining business ventures. He was often gone, but just as often he played caregiver for his grand- and great-grandchildren, of which there were dozens. Jackson was a near-permanent resident, and a clear favorite. Wherever Jackson was, Harold was not far off, tongs or brandy in hand. He was one of the few residents at Halcyon who didn’t secrete himself away in an air-conditioned box all day.

“Hello, Mr. Merton,” she said. “I’m so sorry — I didn’t mean to interrupt or disturb.”

“Young lady, if I was disturbed by every person who washed my towels they’d have to put me straight into an asylum.” He eyed the folded linens. “You can take those straight in to their cubby; Lily’s figured out the pillowcases but I’d just as soon leave the fitted sheets for Ellie.” Lily and Ellie were two teenaged granddaughters who spent the weekends in Marana “helping” around the house.

Arlene nodded sympathetically and mounted the concrete step. Harold held the door for her and she kept her head down as she passed, trying not to make a mess of things.

“Arlene likes my skink!” Jackson said from the stoop, and behind her she heard Harold chuckle.

“That’s because she’s from out East,” he replied. “She doesn’t know any better. Here, there’s an old yogurt container under the kitchen sink you can keep him in — but only for the day, mind. Kathleen will be here tomorrow to pick you up and I’m not feeding him while you’re in Baja on vacation, alright?” The screen door slammed and small feet slapped on the tiled floors, cutting off as Jackson ran into the kitchen.

Arlene knelt to unpack the crate and empty the laundry basket left for her. A stack of mail sat beside the hamper, and she knocked it to the floor while picking up the bundled sheets. “Oh!” she said, then apologized to thin air. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, hastily scooping up the envelopes.

“Jackson was supposed to take it in to the den,” said Harold. “Not your fault. But that reminds me, I have something to go out.” He held out his free hand for the mail and she handed it over, still kneeling. She didn’t raise her eyes all of the way, however, just smiled quietly.

“Raytheon’s a good company,” she murmured. “I hear they take good care of their people.”

Harold glanced down at the papers in his hand, spotting the Raytheon logo on the top letter. “I wouldn’t know,” he said, stomping down the hall. “They fired me thirty-six years ago and I haven’t looked back since. I wouldn’t take a damn penny today if they threw it at my head, but then, I don’t need the money these days.”

“Sorry for mentioning it,” Arlene whispered, straightening, holding the laundry close. “That’s terrible.”

“Yes it is,” said Harold from out of sight down the hall. “But it’s not your fault, little lady. Don’t ever apologize for something that’s not your fault, or you’ll end up washing laundry for a living instead of just the money.” He reappeared with a pack of new envelopes, freshly stamped. “I know this isn’t your job, but I caught old Pete Entwhistle holding one up to the light last week. You don’t mind running these out to the post office sometime today or tomorrow, do you?”

This was how it always started, Mila had warned her. Get one of the residents to start trusting you, and they start asking you to do things, then more things, all of it off the clock and unpaid, until they forget what your actual job is, and the lines are so blurred they resent you for just doing the laundry on a busy day — and then a tentative relationship becomes a liability, becomes an “incident.”

Arlene took the mail, barely glancing at it before tucking it into the wide pocket of her uniform dress. “Not a problem, Mr. Merton. Anything else you need?”

“A new liver,” he replied tartly. “Mind you take those straight to the post office,” he warned, and handed her a crisp twenty-dollar bill. “And get yourself a nice pair of gloves.”

“Oh, no, sir,” Arlene protested, pushing the money back at him, but he shook his head. “I can’t accept this!”

“One of the nice things about being an old eccentric in a village full of old eccentrics,” he murmured, “is that I get to throw a little change at the help. Every penny I throw away is a penny that abominable daughter-in-law of mine doesn’t get to inherit, girl, so consider it a public service. Goodbye now.”

Dazed, Arlene let the screen door slap shut behind her, heard voices in the kitchen echoing behind her, the soft _pop_ of a yogurt container opening. She slid the crate full of dirty laundry into the back of the shuttle and yanked on the doorhandle until it latched. It felt as though the cash in her hand was made of lead, or sheet metal. The envelopes hung heavy in her pocket. She pulled away from the curb, taking Helios all the way down the hill to Homer and the facilities services building cluster. The unloading process was simple, just a mere matter of labeling the crates and stacking them on the folding tables in front of the bank of washers and dryers, and then she delivered the shuttle back to its spot in the village lot before returning the key to its hook beside Ed’s desk.

Arlene signed the logbook and left, walking slowly down the damp black asphalt to the bus stop just outside Halcyon’s front gates. She had a while to wait — buses only ran every half hour out here — and sat down to wait. After a long, quiet minute listening to the birds in the mesquite, she pulled out the envelopes and slowly, one at a time, held them up to the streetlight.

This is why she’d come, after all. This is why Argo had become Arlene.


	10. Melania // Trump Tower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Melania becomes a pivot, a fulcrum, for forces both in and out of her knowledge.

* * *

## Melania Trump // Trump Tower, New York City (NY)*

* * *

* * *

 

“This is all so _early_ ,” Melania whispered into the phone, feeling foolish and very much alone in the tower, floor after floor of empty rooms echoing around her. She was not in her suite, not for this phone call. She’d picked a random apartment on a random floor, as she now always did when expecting a call from her eldest step-daughter. But who knew? Perhaps every room in the tower was bugged, after seven years. “Ivanka, he hasn’t even begun that third term everyone was so afraid of. Maybe you won’t have to push.”

Her voice held a note of entreaty. The only thing which could be dangerous to her now was what had always been most dangerous — and this was the very thing Ivanka wanted her to throw herself up against.

“You are his Esther,” Ivanka said, crisply. Biblical allusions were now their stock and trade, which was perhaps appropriate as well as useful for reaching the Evangelical Right. After all, the Bible was pretty much an anthology of waste and sexual dissipation and all kinds of people “displeasing to the Lord,” which was more or less the perpetual state of the universe, in Melania’s experience. 

But she couldn’t remember this one, not well enough at least.

“Esther? The pretty one?”

The sound of rowdy children rose above the background noise on Ivanka’s end, and the younger woman said something, muffled by distance or a hand over the phone’s mike. The sounds receded into white noise, followed by the distinct _click_ of a shut door.

“Sorry,” murmured Ivanka. “Arabella wanted to start planning for her birthday today, and invited several friends.”

“Her birthday isn’t until — ” Melania wracked her mind for the date, “mid-July, isn’t it?” She had it in her calendar, and gifts planned out for years to come for all of the children. Arabella was thirteen.

“She likes to plan ahead,” Ivanka replied, her tone shifting. “But yes, Esther is thought to have been very pretty. She captured the interest of one King Xerxes, and served as an intermediary for her uncle when Xerxes was set to annihilate the Jews in Persia.”

“No one is annihilating anyone,” Melania replied hesitantly. 

“Well,” said Ivanka, implying something more, “that’s not really the point, is it? Esther became queen because of her beauty, and did as she was asked at great personal risk because she knew what the future would hold otherwise.”

“I think you’re massaging this analogy a bit much.” Melania ran a finger down the drawn curtains masking her hideaway from the city proper. This room looked East, which meant it had almost no view at all from this height. 

Ivanka was cross with her, she knew. It had been weeks, and Melania had made no move to plant the seeds her daughter-in-law had forced into her fingers. Why should she? Very little had frightened her as much as Donald in power, but now she found herself terrified of what must come after. The dissolution, the frantic reaching after shrinking avenues to power, the jockeying for position, the sudden loss of anchor in a sea of uncertain loyalties. A throwback to Ivanka’s conversion to Judaism years and years back wasn’t going to change her position, or her fears. Melania shuddered at the dust cascading through the filtered sunlight at her lightest touch. 

How long had it been since someone had lived in this room? The porcelain around the sink drain was chipped and stained, as if someone had been rinsing old coffee down the drain.

“It’s time to make a move, Melania.” Ivanka dropped something on the other end of the line, a soft clatter followed by a sharp exhalation, probably a repressed imprecation. Ivanka was far too polished and — yes — presidential to let her guard down, even with the one woman who could understand her layered existence. Her husband had been appointed Senior Advisor to the President of the United States early on; they’d been introduced by Wendi Deng Murdoch, ex-wife of a media mogul and one-time paramour of Vladamir Putin. Even Ivanka’s home was complicated. It had been thoroughly bugged to follow the conversations of former owner Dan Rapoport, a Latvian private equity investor who’d once had a hand in shaping Mitt Romney’s criticisms of that same Russian demagogue, and decamped to the Ukraine after problems on the marriage front. They were still pulling microphones out of the light fixtures all these years later, and hoping fancifully that they predated the Trump and Kushner residency.

Melania had a son; she’d seen _Shrek_ at least once too often to forget the onion metaphor. She tried to push it from her mind as something unworthy of her, but … it stuck.

“It’s time,” Ivanka repeated. And then the line went dead.

Melania slid the phone into the pocket of her trench coat, just something she’d thrown on that morning to disguise the fact she didn’t feel like changing out of her silk nightdress. She felt older than ever. Being a mother to a teenager and a stepmother to a woman with her own teenager was exhausting, much less being … whatever else she was.

Truthfully, Melania had never quite felt like a First Lady, at least not the same breed and creed as Michelle Obama and Eleanor Roosevelt, who actually _did_ things with their position — social justice things, things geared and intended to reshape the world. But then, Melania had never really felt much like the other billionaire’s wives among whom she moved, unwillingly, when compelled by status and position to move at all. She liked her home, and her things, and her art. She liked her son, most of the time, and occasionally she even liked living in New York — what she could see of it, anyway, between the bodies of her Secret Service detail and through the tinted bulletproof windows of her Escalade.

Other wives wanted power, or position, or prestige. She just wanted a _life_ , with all the options.

* * *

Describing the exit from Trump Tower as “a hassle” was rather an understatement, but then she’d grown used to saying what she wanted people to believe rather than … anything else. All of the staircases and elevators had to be cleared out, firstly, and then the common areas and hallways leading to each elevator and staircase door, to prevent surprise unauthorized access during her progress. Many years ago, they’d decided the easiest way to accomplish this was to install automated barricades and surveillance cameras, despite residents’ complaints, and as a result the building had continued to bleed full-time residents until mostly just the Secret Service, certain favored journalists, and the family’s various private staffers and aides were left. Anyway, they didn’t have to clear each floor anymore unless someone ignored the broadcast alerts and remained inside the barricades.

Even so, the bottom floors of Trump Tower more or less had to be cleared out, which was an incredible effort, since there were restaurants and shops and the like down there, as well as a public arcade. Certain areas could be partitioned and were not shut down, but whenever Melania sallied forth she was aware of others on the perimeter, shadowy figures with protest signs and shirts and shut-off faces, many of them grim enough to inspire specific “encouragement” from her detail to move yet further away. Down on the street, an escort with flashing lights would block traffic both directions until she was safely on her way, and uniformed cops would shout at those innocent or dedicated enough to dodge the security barricades. Each shopping trip was the same, each trip to a museum or gala. She had never quite gotten used to giving New York an aneurysm just by stepping outside.

She much preferred the helicopter, despite her fear of heights. It was neater, and simpler, and she didn’t have to endure all those empty floors and the peeling paint and the eyes of people she’d never care to know dissecting her mood, her wants, her needs, her secrets. And she wasn’t _really_ afraid of heights, just of poor pilots and the mavericks her husband liked to surround himself with. 

She crossed the roof with a hand shading her eyes against the high sun, aware of the circling Secret Service helicopter which would tail her all the way to her destination — the airport. Melania was due in Mar-a-Lago for a fundraiser dinner with her husband, a completely pointless exercise like all other completely pointless exercises, at least on a surface level: Donald Trump had already been notified of his official election win. Of course, since they were more or less always paying off campaign debt, the fundraiser was a useful thing … if she supported the campaign in the first place.

Melania hated Mar-a-Lago. It was too hot, too gritty, too humid, too much of a fishbowl. She rarely remembered how much she hated it until the flight attendants cracked the seal afresh on each flight in to let down the stairs, but she remembered it now — watching her carefully packed valise be handed off from helicopter to plane — and as she herself was handed off by polite men in crisp uniforms with carefully neutral expressions. At fifty-three, she was unlikely to break in transit, but these crews were more used to dealing with her husband — who was indeed more fragile, at seventy-seven — and her son Barron, who took the helicopter to school in the mornings and had arguably a more precious reputation than any other member of the extended Trump clan.

Up the stairs, ducking, sliding into her designated seat. Engines shrieking as they warmed up. Outside, the runways were being cleared, the whole airport frozen as Melania Trump took off. She crossed her legs, then reconsidered, slipping a finger into the heel of her stiletto out of force of habit. 

“Could I get a Tylenol, please?” she asked, waving down an attendant who smelled rather pleasantly of caramel. 

“I’ll put in a quick call to your physician to let him know,” the young woman whispered with a smile before ducking back to the little alcove where they kept the coffee maker. Even a single Tylenol went on the First Lady’s chart, somewhere, noted down for perpetuity. 

First Lady. She sank a little into her seat, dimly aware that this flight took her from the realm of simple unknowable Melania into the glaring lights of First Lady Melania Trump, in which every puzzle and pore had been licked clean by the media and the profiteers over the years. She took the proferred blue tab of medication in silence, with mineral water, as usual. She set a timer on her phone before closing her eyes, ignoring the stacks of glossy magazines piled on the seat next to her, as was also usual. 

Little did she know, this would be her last flight to Mar-a-Lago.

Somewhere in the belly of the little jet, another timer ticked slowly down.

 

* * *

 

 

> _* NOTE: This is entirely a work of fanfiction, and is intended to depict a future I hope never comes to pass as well as characters who bear a tenuous resemblance to figures of past and present history. It is not, and it should never be construed as, a malicious attempt to smear anyone involved._

 


End file.
